CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- The space shuttle Discovery will bring a new bedroom suite to the International Space Station when it lifts off on Thursday but the focus of the new crew's mission will be experiments rather than expansion of the orbiting outpost, Reuters reported on Wednesday.

Although the station is just half the size it will be when completed in 2006 or thereabouts, NASA decided early on that some of the science it had planned should not wait.

So the next team to live there, the Expedition Three crew, will spend more time with experiments as construction slows for the time being.

Discovery is set to lift off from the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday with two crews aboard. One will make the trip up and back. The second -- two Russians and their American commander -- will start a five-month tour on the station. The current crew of three will catch a ride home.

The station's next commander is 52-year-old Frank Culbertson, an astronaut who has not flown in eight years but has now escaped a desk job as a space station executive, trading his blue suit for a pressure suit.

Culbertson and his crew mates, Vladimir Dezhurov, veteran of a stint on the Mir space station, and rookie Mikhail Tyurin, will not see another shuttle until December, when one arrives to take them home.

They will have a week-long visit from a Russian Soyuz crew that will deliver a new escape craft for them but otherwise, the crew faces five months of isolation.

"The station's going to be so large, with four good-sized modules, that we could go a good long time without seeing one another," Culbertson said.

In addition to the science work headed to space along with them, the expedition crew is taking along 1,000 pounds (450 kg) of food and another 1,000 pounds of clothing and other provisions.