In fact, this will be the first station crew that won't host any guests, either from Soyuz taxi missions or by space shuttle. The next crew they see will be their ride home.

"I sort of see it as a neutral," said Bowersox, a Navy Captain from Bedford, Ind., who is a veteran of four spaceflights including two missions to service the Hubble Space Telescope. "It'd be nice to have people come visit us. On the other hand it's going to be nice to have all that peace and quiet I think."

Stepping outside

Bowersox will have to give up his quiet routine on Dec. 5 for about 6.5 hours when he and Budarin will put on American spacesuits and depart the Quest airlock.

"I'm really looking forward to it," Bowersox said. "I can't wait to see what the Earth looks like just through a visor instead of those big thick windows."

For Budarin, an RSC Energia cosmonaut from the Russian city of Kirya with two spaceflights to his credit, the spacewalk will mark the first time a Russian has donned an American spacesuit and gone outside by leaving through the U.S. Quest airlock.

The milestone marks for the space station program the fact that with this spacewalk Americans and Russians will have worn each other's suits and used both American and Russian airlocks -- demonstrating every possible combination available to the international crews.

Once outside, Bowersox and Budarin will have four main tasks, jobs that were originally assigned to spacewalks on the STS-112 and STS-113 shuttle missions.

But when new tasks were added to those shuttle spacewalks NASA mission managers took what couldn't get done and approved the inclusion of a spacewalk on the Expedition Six increment.

Those activities include:

Releasing locks and launch restraints on the radiator panels of the P-One (P1) truss that is about to be installed at the station during Endeavour's mission.

Moving a tool box from the station's Z-One truss down to a mobile work platform that slides along the main truss' rail.

Deploying a UHF radio antenna on the P1 truss that will serve as a backup to an antenna already installed on the Destiny science module.

Installing a light fixture and lamp on the mobile work platform, which goes by the name of Crew Equipment Translation Aid, or CETA.

Remaining inside will be Pettit, a chemical engineer from Silverton, Oregon who is a space rookie.

Crew change

Pettit trained as the backup to veteran astronaut Don Thomas, who originally was supposed to fly on Expedition Six. But in July, Pettit replaced Thomas due to an issue with Thomas' medical certification for flight.

Station managers say Pettit won't have any problem filling in.

"It's been pretty transparent and it's demonstrated the absolute value of having our backup crewmembers trained and ready to go," Gard said. "Don Thomas played a tremendous role in bringing Don Pettit up to speed and providing him the insight that he had as a result of his training."

Pettit, still admittedly in shock over the whole thing, says he'll be fine.

"You never expect to be switched in as a back up crewmember. Events happen that are outside your control and all of a sudden you wake up one day and you find you're prime crew," Pettit said.

As a result, Pettit said that he took all of his training very seriously, even before he knew he had become a member of the primer crew. You only have to look at where you're going to keep things in perspective, he said.

"You're living and working in a place where human beings are not meant to be. And the only reason you can be there is you take machines with you that provide the things you need. And you better make sure you know how those machines work, because you're going to be in a world of hurt if you don't and the machine breaks," Pettit said.

Science time

A great deal of the Expedition Six crew's timeline will be devoted to science, although routine maintenance, packing and unpacking Progress freighters and the other necessities of life in space will take up the majority of the schedule.

"We're pretty busy folks up there, so we're getting done as much science as we can at this point in time for the construction of the space station," Pettit said. "There's a whole cadre of really neat things we're going to be doing on board."

Nineteen science investigations are planned for this increment and many won't require a lot of crew involvement anyway.

Those experiments include nine human life sciences investigations and seven materials research and processing studies.

Of three remaining, one involves students remotely pointing cameras at Earth and another simply exposes various materials to the space environment.

The last involves crewmembers taking pictures of Earth using high power lenses and testing methods for compensating for the station's movement and Earth's rotation as the picture is being taken so the results won't be blurred.

"Literally what the crewmember does is wave the camera while he's taking the photograph," said Vic Cooley, NASA's Expedition Six increment scientist in Houston.

Pettit will serve as the expedition's science officer, the second of the program since NASA Administrator named Expedition Five flight engineer Whitson as the first.

"Right now the position of science officer is still evolving," Pettit said. "I see myself more as an on orbital advocate for making sure the science gets done."

Pettit said that he hopes future science officers who are selected earlier in the mission planning process will have more influence on what kind of science gets done onboard and helps develop the procedures.

One person he won't have any trouble influencing is Bowersox, the mission commander.

Bowersox said he is going to spend his free time on weekends doing what he calls "Saturday morning science."

"It may not be something that's specifically outlined in our mission but something we hope will contribute to the long-term goals of the station," Bowersox said. "The key is, I get to pick it. It's stuff that I get to do."

In all, 200 hours of the timeline are scheduled in the crew's timeline for science, officials said.