How to set order of repositories in Maven settings.xml

Question

I have 3 repositories in my settings.xml because I need artifacts from all of them. Whenever a dependency is not found, Maven tries

Downloading: http://some.server/mvn2repo/releases/org/apache/lucene/lucene-core/2.9.1/...
[INFO] Unable to find resource 'org.apache.lucene:lucene-core:pom:2.9.1' in repository
Downloading: http://some.server/mvn2repo/3rdParty/org/apache/lucene/lucene-core/2.9.1/...
[INFO] Unable to find resource 'org.apache.lucene:lucene-core:pom:2.9.1' in repository
Downloading: http://repo1.maven.org/maven2/org/apache/lucene/lucene-core/2.9.1/lucene-core-2.9.1.pom
<success>

all repositories, but most of the time finds the artifact in central (repo1) of course. I want Maven to check this repo first. I tried order of declarations in settings.xml, but did not work. According to fgysin I also tried the reverse order, which didn't change anything.

My Maven version:

C:\>mvn -v
Apache Maven 2.2.1 (r801777; 2009-08-06 21:16:01+0200)
Java version: 1.6.0_15
Java home: C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_15\jre
Default locale: de_AT, platform encoding: Cp1252
OS name: "windows vista" version: "6.0" arch: "amd64" Family: "windows"

My settings.xml

<profiles>
    <profile>
        <id>space</id>
        <repositories>
            <repository>
                <releases>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </releases>
                <snapshots>
                    <enabled>false</enabled>
                </snapshots>
                <id>s1-releases</id>
                <name>System One Releases</name>
                <url>http://some.server/mvn2repo/releases</url>
            </repository>
            <repository>
                <releases>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </releases>
                <snapshots>
                    <enabled>false</enabled>
                </snapshots>
                <id>s1-3rdParty</id>
                <name>System One 3rd Party Releases</name>
                <url>http://some.server/mvn2repo/3rdParty</url>
            </repository>
            <repository>
                <releases>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </releases>
                <snapshots>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </snapshots>
                <id>central</id>
                <url>http://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
            </repository>
        </repositories>
        <pluginRepositories>
            <pluginRepository>
                <releases>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </releases>
                <snapshots>
                    <enabled>true</enabled>
                </snapshots>
                <id>central</id>
                <url>http://repo1.maven.org/maven2</url>
            </pluginRepository>
        </pluginRepositories>
    </profile>
</profiles>

<activeProfiles>
    <activeProfile>space</activeProfile>
</activeProfiles>

Answer 1

As far as I know, the order of the repositories in your pom.xml will also decide the order of the repository access.

As for configuring repositories in settings.xml, I've read that the order of repositories is interestingly enough the inverse order of how the repositories will be accessed.

Here a post where someone explains this curiosity:
http://community.jboss.org/message/576851