Europe’s new Jules Verne cargo ship made a nearly flawless first docking at the International Space Station on Thursday, carrying tons of needed supplies and expanding Europe’s role in space.

The robotic spacecraft, gingerly approaching the station at one-tenth of a foot per second, docked with the space station at 10:45 a.m. Eastern time while the two vehicles flew more than 200 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. Seven minutes later, a series of clamps firmly secured the vehicles.

“We have contact,” the Russian astronaut Col. Yuri I. Malenchenko said from inside the space station, where he and the American commander of the station, Peggy A. Whitson, were monitoring the operation. The comment brought applause and cheers from the cargo craft’s European control center in Toulouse, France.

The Jules Verne, named after the visionary French science fiction author, is the first of a new class of station supply ships called Automatic Transfer Vehicles. The craft was built by the nations of the European Space Agency as one of Europe’s major contributions to the international station.