ISS commander Bill Shepherd. Photo: NASA

U.S. space station commander William Shepherd said today his biggest challenge during his crew's first few days aboard the international outpost will be keeping his two cosmonaut shipmates from working too hard.

Looking fit and relaxed on the eve of their historic launch Tuesday, Shepherd also expressed frustration over the failure of the station's international partners to agree on a name for the orbital outpost.

"For thousands of years, humans have been going to sea on ships," he told reporters at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. "The people who design and build these vessels launch them with the good feeling that a name will bring good fortune to the crew and success to their voyage.

"I would hope that this tradition would continue on ISS but as yet, we're waiting for some decision from our managers as to whether we're going to follow this tradition or not."

Shepherd, Soyuz commander Yuri Gidzenko and flight engineer Sergei Krikalev are scheduled for launch atop a Soyuz rocket at 2:53 a.m. EST Tuesday. If all goes well, the trio will dock with the station Thursday to begin a planned three-and-a-half month stay.

After training together for more than four years and enduring numerous delays and setbacks, Shepherd and his "Expedition One" crewmates are clearly eager to finally be on their way.

"Certainly the delays we've had in getting the right pieces of hardware in orbit have been very frustrating," Shepherd said. "We've had many times where we all have felt like we should probably be doing something else. And I'm very glad we're here together and ready to go."

The primary goals of Expedition One are to activate the station's life support and control systems, to stow supplies and equipment left by earlier shuttle crews and to iron out any wrinkles in the complicated joint U.S.-Russian flight control system.

A shuttle flight in February will deliver the Expedition Two crew and bring Shepherd, Gidzenko and Krikalev back to Earth.

The ISS Expedition 1 crew takes a break from training in the systems integration facility at the Johnson Space Center for a crew photo. From the left: flight engineer Sergei Krikalev, mission commander Bill Shepherd and Soyuz commander Yuri Gidzenko. Photo: NASA

"I started working on this program seven-and-a-half years ago," Shepherd said. "My determination is to get on board the space shuttle in February leaving the second crew a fully functional space station, having completed the assembly of the components that are brought to us and basically turn over a good ship to those who will follow behind us."

The major items on the Expedition One initial agenda are assembly of the station's Elektron oxygen generator, its Vozdukh carbon dioxide removal system, communications gear and a host of other critical systems.

"There are some systems that are already assembled, others require further work," Krikalev said today. "We will be testing those systems operating together, this is something that we couldn't have tested on the ground.

"These tests are the primary objective of our flight. We will, of course, have some research experiments. But this is the primary task."

Shepherd said the flight plan for the crew's first few days is "fairly ambitious."

"It's been carefully thought out, but we've got a lot to do for the first week," he said. "I think my biggest challenge is going to be throttling these guys, keeping the work pace kind of under control because they're very competent and aggressive guys and they're going to work really hard.

"My job is to make sure the crew stays on an even keel and we get the work done well but without tiring ourselves out."

Despite initial concerns about the language barrier and sharp cultural differences between the U.S. and Russian space programs, all three station fliers said those problems were behind them and that both sides have developed a good working relationship.

The crew tours a Russian space museum earlier this month. Photo: NASA

As for the individual crew members, Shepherd said, "I think we get along exceptionally well. Sometimes we do things without even exchanging words, we have a sense of what we're supposed to do and it works very well.

"We've had a lot of practice these last four years dealing with very difficult situations in training, some intentional, some unintentional, a lot of management issues," he added. "I think this crew is exceptionally well prepared to have a great mission in space."

Said Krikalev: "When we started out training and the training period was short, I had some concern that we would have problems because of misunderstandings within the crew and because of misunderstandings between the mission control teams.

"At the moment, I see no problems. We have spent longer in training and we have developed a good understanding. We work as a single team and it doesn't matter which of us is formally the commander of the mission."

As for the language barrier, "Sergei coined the term for working in two languages together 'runglish,'" Shepherd said.

"I guess the sense of our crew is we've tried to practice being versatile, we've tried to deal with these situations as need be and I think that flexibility will be the hallmark of what international crews have to do in space."