Making Themselves At Home

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

March 14, 2001 / 7:35 AM EST / CBS

A whole new crew is settling in on board the international space station Alpha.

Two American astronauts and one Russian cosmonaut finished moving on board the station early Wednesday. Brought to the station by the space shuttle Discovery, the trio of James Voss, Susan Helms, and Yuri Usachev will spend the next four months on board Alpha.

"We are very much looking forward to it. We're more like family than we are like a crew. We are just going to have the time of our lives," said Helms, the last replacement crew member to move into the station.

Helms added the biggest challenges she expects for herself during her stay on Alpha will be the psychological ones involved with living in an isolated environment for many months.

"However, I've been mentally preparing myself for that. I feel like that's not going to impact the work getting done," Helms said.

Known as Expedition Two, the team of Helms, Voss, and Usachev is the first replacement crew for the space station. They are relieving the station's Expedition One crew of U.S. astronaut Bill Shepherd and his two Russian shipmates, Yuri Gidzenko and Sergei Krikalev. Expedition One has stayed on Alpha for the last four months.

"The torch is passing from one crew to the next, as well as the phase of flight for the international space station where we go from construction to utilization," NASA flight director John Shannon said.

As the replacement crew finished moving into its new home, Shepherd - the station's first commander - left his post to become a member of the Discovery for the return ride to Earth. His crewmates Gidzenko and Krikalyov had already yielded their berths to Expedition Two counterparts in recent days.

Shepherd will remain commander on the station until the hatches close between the shuttle and station on Saturday, but should Discovery have to make a hurried departure, his place would be on the shuttle's mid-deck, not the station's command center.

Besides delivering the new crew for the station, the shuttle Discovery brought up an Italian-made module filled with five tons of equipment and supplies.

Inside the station, both crews have almost finished removing gear in the module, which was attached to Alpha early Monday.

The first experiments for the U.S. science lab Destiny were removed from the module, named Leonardo. The experiments will study the effects of weightlessness on the human body.

"It's a wonderful place," Voss said of the $1.4 billion Destiny lab. "We're going to enjoy working in there."

Also removed from Leonardo were electronics, communications gear, a defibrillator, other emergency medical equipment, and the work station for Alpha's robotic arm, scheduled to be delivered in April.

Once emptied and refilled with trash, the module will be put back in the shuttle Discovery and returned to Earth.

Astronauts completed two spacewalks during th shuttle's mission. They helped make way for Leonardo, continued to outfit the growing station and prepped the outside of Alpha to receive its robotic arm.

The first spacewalk, a nine-hour excursion Sunday by Helms and Voss, was NASA's longest ever.

"It was too short," Helms joked.

And that's not the only milestone achieved during the mission.

Including Discovery commander James Wetherbee and its pilot James Kelly, currently there's a total of 10 astronauts at work in and around Alpha, making it the busiest that the space station has ever been. Before, eight was the largest number posted there.