Video: NASA officials preview space station battery replacement spacewalks

Astronauts Anne McClain and Nick Hague floated outside the International Space Station Friday to complete the installation of powerful new batteries in the lab’s solar power system, a complex task that began in 2017. Another set of batteries will be installed during another spacewalk next Friday.

Two Russian cosmonauts used the International Space Station’s Poisk docking compartment as an airlock for the first time Wednesday in a six-hour 48-minute spacewalk to begin preparing the nearly identical Pirs module for removal next year. A new laboratory module will be parked in its place later.

Running nearly a month late because of work to repair a damaged cable, a Russian Soyuz spacecraft was primed for launch early Wednesday to carry two cosmonauts and a NASA astronaut to the International Space Station, boosting the lab’s crew back to six.