Video: Change of command aboard International Space Station

Now in the home stretch of a complex, multi-year upgrade, two space station astronauts floated outside the lab complex Thursday and pressed ahead with the third of four spacewalks the current crew is carrying out to complete the replacement of aging batteries in the station’s solar power system.

Four commercial space fliers who launched from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Axiom’s second private astronaut mission Sunday arrived at the International Space Station on a SpaceX crew capsule Monday to start an eight-day stay full of scientific experiments, student outreach events, and sightseeing.

Russian cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, French-born European Space Agency flight engineer Thomas Pesquet and veteran NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson put on their Sokol spacesuits, boarded their Soyuz capsule and blasted into orbit Thursday from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Check out photos of their launch day activities.