By Irene Brown

Before NASA astronaut Susan Helms takes up residence aboard the International Space Station, she plans to cancel her credit cards, move her furniture into storage and forward her mail to a post-office box.

"I’m going to shut down my entire life on Earth. I want to move to space and make it a permanent home. I think that’s what people in the future are going to have to do when they travel to other planets. They’re going to have to get to this mindset that they’re leaving one home planet and moving to another," she says.

Helms has an opportunity to preview her new home and fine-tune her plans for her move, now scheduled for next spring. She, along with her two crewmates assigned to the second long-duration station mission, were added in February as members of the shuttle Atlantis crew making a servicing call to the station this month.

"It was definitely a surprise," says Helms. "We already had a huge portion of training that you’d want to have (for station servicing), so we were a natural fit."

Confesses crewmate Jim Voss, "When this flight came up, I thought it was mostly for my morale that they assigned me."

Voss has been preparing for a station mission longer than most. He trained as a backup for the last three Americans to live on Mir, a job that has had him shuttling back and forth between Russia and his home in Houston for four years.

"Sometimes I considered it hardship duty, but it was a tremendous experience for me," says Voss, whose wife and daughter moved to Russia for one year. "I did think about dropping out because it was very difficult. Being sent to Russia you’re totally out of touch with things in the States. You feel pretty isolated. The language is extremely, extremely difficult. There were times when I wondered if it was really worth it, but I’m convinced that it is."

Helms, who is single and not a parent, had an easier time with the hefty travel requirements of her job.

"I’ve gotten to the point where I have this dual life," she says. "I have Russian friends and a lifestyle over there that I enjoy. It’s not the same as it is here because it’s a different environment, but I’m enjoying the heck out of it."

Helms, Voss and their commander, cosmonaut Yuri Usachev, will follow the first station expedition crew, which is now more than a year behind its planned launch. Bill Sheperd, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko are now expected to begin their four-month mission by early November. Two more expedition crews are in training.

"If anything’s important it’s to keep this expedition core of astronauts really motivated and fired up so that the rest of the astronauts who think they’re only going to fly on the space shuttle start to look over their shoulders toward the expedition core and say, ‘That looks like the place be,’" says NASA astronaut Michael Foale, who lived on Mir and who is now serving as the chief of the expedition core.

"I want to make the space station crews happy. I want them to feel that the years and years of travel back and forth away from their families to Russia or to America from Russia was worth it," he says.

Among those waiting in the wings is Frank Culbertson, who directed the troubled but highly successful shuttle-Mir program, which served as a pilot run for joint U.S-Russian spaceflights. Culbertson is to command the third live-aboard crew.

Training is difficult, says Culbertson, but the experience as a whole is good preparation for an expedition to an outpost in space.

"It’s different than being at home. And living in space is going to be different than living at home. If you can’t adapt to that, you probably shouldn’t be thinking about long-duration missions," he says.

"Living in space is what we need to be looking toward, not just short little trips to visit," Culbertson adds. "We’re never going to go anywhere beyond low-Earth orbit unless we can live in space for long periods of time."