He says Lu and the commander, Malenchenko, are good friends, and he doesn't expect they'll have problems.

They've flown together before and even performed a spacewalk together. They had trained for a March shuttle mission to the station -- canceled after the Feb. 1 shuttle Columbia disaster -- before the station crews were shuffled.

"They have a lot of psychological support in place," said Shannon Lucid, NASA's chief scientist, who lived on the Russian Mir space station for six months in 1996.

Station crews get regular family calls and video conferences, Voss said, as well as chats with mission controllers and even a psychologist on Earth.

"There's a lot of capability, so the person on orbit now can communicate with the person on the ground," Lucid said.

6th crew returns

Lu and Malenchenko will lift off from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, and about a week later, the three-man crew of Ken Bowersox, Don Pettit and Nikolai Budarin will return to Kazakhstan in the old Soyuz capsule before traveling to Star City in Russia.

The smaller replacement crew will need less water and food, usually supplied in abundance by U.S. shuttles.

Like the new crew, Bowersox's trio, on board since Nov. 25, has had no human visitors -- only unmanned supply ships. The Russian Progress capsules often arrive with treats and personal items aboard. For instance, friends sent Budarin a 2004 calendar as a joke.

"I couldn't believe how excited we were when we first got our care package that came up on a Progress," Voss said.

Lu and Malenchenko, known as Expedition Seven, also will get a few treats via Progress, but those care packages will offer only a temporary respite from isolation and tedium.

"In your normal routine days, you are in your own little world there," Voss said. "You are living and working in your space."

Because there are no spacewalks, shuttle visits or construction chores scheduled, Lu and Malenchenko will have plenty of time to do maintenance, NASA has said.

"They're basically there to take care of the station," Lucid said, and they won't have much science to do.

Less science

Because so little science equipment and material can be carried by the Soyuz and Progress ships, there won't be much new research.

"We're limited by the mass we can carry up, and most of the mass is made up of just the things you need to survive," Voss said.

The crew will look for creative ways to do science on board, much as Pettit has performed entertaining "Saturday morning science" experiments with water, Alka Seltzer and other materials in microgravity.

"Being underworked -- which is what I very often was -- leads to boredom," said former NASA astronaut Norman Thagard, a Mir veteran and the first American to fly on a Soyuz. "And being overworked chronically tends to lead to friction between the crew and the Mission Control Center, and I think my two Russian crewmates were overworked, and I sure could see the friction develop. So they need to be in the comfortable middle range there. They need to be reasonably busy with meaningful work."

Bonds tested

Expedition Seven will be more than a test of the crew's endurance and friendship. It's also a test of the United States' relationship with Russia and the station's other international partners.

"We're really pulling together as a team," space station program manager Bill Gerstenmaier said. "We're recognizing where we need critical consumables, where we need critical activities."

The partners are willing to make sacrifices to help the station succeed, he said.

The new reality since the Columbia disaster is that Russia is the station's lifeline. It provides the only ships that can transfer crews and supplies. A European supply ship is still more than a year away, and the shuttles are grounded until the Columbia accident investigators finish their work and NASA makes safety changes.

The cultural differences between the Russian and U.S. space programs are well-known.

For instance, "I think that we have a little bit different approach to the way we design and build our spacecraft," Voss said. "They tend to build something that's very reliable that has systems that they just plan to replace periodically, whereas we plan to build things that will last through the life of a program."

The Americans also build-in redundancy -- duplicate electronics and other systems, for example -- to handle failures.

Voss is pleased that the station combines Russian and U.S. systems. After all, that combination has provided the Russian backup that's keeping the station alive.

The countries have different training and learning styles, too. Lucid remembers a spacewalk on Mir when she was expected to move the solar panels from inside the station. "We do everything by a checklist," she said of American astronauts. "We have everything written down."

But Yuri Onufrienko insisted on giving her the instructions without a step-by-step procedure.

Finally, she said, "Look, Yuri, I'm just a very, very stupid American woman. I have to have this written down." He agreed to write it down. Later, when numbers for her task were read off by ground controllers, he was able to repeat them back to her, without notes, while he was in the middle of a spacewalk.

"That's just not the way we are used to doing things, but he did it," Lucid said. "I was just absolutely amazed."

In other areas, different cultural cues can cause confusion. Lucid was used to associating certain colors with certain functions. Red might connote an emergency or something urgent.

The fire extinguishers on Mir were a surprise. "They were all the same color as the wall," she said. "They just blended in."

Success on Mir

Lucid had a three-person crew, but Mir frequently was populated by two-person crews. Their experiences showed a two-person crew can succeed, Voss said.

"They seemed to do quite well in handling what problems they had," he said. "I don't think the risk would be significantly higher."

The Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, which advises NASA, released a statement earlier this month that said NASA's station program managers had assessed risks involving a two-person crew and taken appropriate action.

"The engineers and all the smart people have done their analysis, and the decision has been made that it's much better for the space station if we keep it continually crewed," Lucid said. ". . . I think the crew is going to have a really good time. It's going to be a real adventure."

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