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A Soyuz rocket carrying a Russian commander, a NASA co-pilot and a United Arab Emirates guest cosmonaut blasted off from Kazakhstan Wednesday, chased down the International Space Station and glided in for a picture-perfect docking, kicking off an unprecedented end-of-year schedule that includes up to a dozen spacewalks.

With Soyuz MS-15/61S commander Oleg Skripochka at the controls, flanked on the left by flight engineer Jessica Meir and on the right by Hazzaa Ali Almansoori, the Soyuz-FG rocket roared to life and climbed away at 9:57:43 a.m. EDT (6:57 p.m. local time), the moment Earths rotation carried the pad into the plane of the stations orbit.

The launching came one day after the Japanese space agency launched an unpiloted HTV cargo ship toward the station carrying a set of replacement batteries for the labs solar power system and equipment to help repair a $2 billion cosmic ray detector.

After a problem-free climb to space, Skripochka and Meir monitored a four-orbit rendezvous with the space station, moving in for docking at the aft port of the Russian Zvezda module at 3:42 p.m.

Standing by to welcome their new crewmates aboard were Expedition 60 commander Alexey Ovchinin, fellow cosmonaut Alexander Skvortsov, European Space Agency astronaut Luca Parmitano and NASA astronauts Nick Hague, Christina Koch and Drew Morgan. The first major item on the expanded crews agenda is arrival of the HTV cargo ship Saturday morning.

Five spacewalks are planned next month to replace 12 aging batteries with six more powerful lithium-ion power packs carried up in the HTVs cargo bay.

Another half dozen EVAs are planned in November and December to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, an unprecedented sequence that will come amid ongoing cargo delivery missions, a full slate of on-board research, a Russian spacewalk and possible visits by commercial crew ships being built by Boeing and SpaceX.

Meir, who holds a private pilots license and a doctorate in marine biology, served as Skripochkas co-pilot in the Soyuzs cramped cockpit, trained to take over in an emergency and fly the spacecraft if needed. Shes also received spacewalk training and hopes to venture outside the station at some point during her stay.

Skripochka is making his third trip to the station and is expected to participate in a Russian spacewalk in November. He is a veteran of three previous EVAs.

Hes a great guy, Meir said. Hes an experienced cosmonaut, so he brings a lot of knowledge and experience to the table for us. Its my first spaceflight and Hazzaa Ali Almansoori, the very first astronaut from the United Arab Emirates, is also brand new, hes only been training as an astronaut for a year. So we often look to Oleg for advice.

Almansoori is the tenth Spaceflight Participant to visit the lab complex and the first since Cirque du Soleils Guy Laliberte in 2009.

This mission is a great milestone, for me personally and for my country, the United Arab Emirates, and for the whole Arab region in general, Almansoori said in a preflight briefing. Im looking forward to joining the crew on the station and to work with them on a daily basis and to conduct experiments. Im looking forward to coming back with knowledge and experience to share with everyone.

A jet fighter pilot, Almansoori is sponsored by the UAE government. But as with earlier space tourists, he will enjoy a relatively short stay in orbit eight days before returning to Earth Oct. 3 with Ovchinin and Hague, who are wrapping up a 202-day mission.

Ovchinin, Hague and Koch took off aboard the Soyuz MS-12/58S spacecraft on March 14. Kochs stay aboard the station has been extended to February and she will join Skvortsov and Parmitano for the ride home aboard their Soyuz MS-13/59S spacecraft after nearly a year 328 days in space.

Koch will set a new record for longest single flight by a female astronaut on Dec. 28, moving past Peggy Whitsons mark of 289 days.

Almansoori will take Kochs seat aboard the MS-12/58S ferry ship coming down on Oct. 3. Morgan, who launched with Skvortsov and Parmitano on July 20, will join Skripochka and Meir when they return to Earth next April. His flight will span 255 days.

The Soyuz launching Wednesday, along with Japans launch of an HTV cargo ship Tuesday (U.S. time), kicks off one of the most challenging station schedules ever attempted with up to 11 U.S. spacewalks planned between now and the end of the year and a Russian EVA in November.

Along with the HTV-8 arrival Saturday, the crew expects to welcome three more cargo ships and, possibly, Boeings CST-100 Starliner crew ferry ship if NASA clears it for launch before the end of the year on a long-awaited unpiloted test flight.

Boeing and SpaceX are both building commercial crew ferry ships to end NASAs sole reliance on the Soyuz. But the program has suffered a series of funding shortfalls and technical problems, and its not yet clear when either company will be clear to launch astronaut crews on initial test flights.

Its a critical issue for NASA because the Russians only plan to launch two Soyuz spacecraft next year, one in March and the other in October. In the absence of an American ferry ship, the station crew will drop from six to three next April when Skripochka, Meir and Morgan return to Earth.

SpaceXs first piloted test flight, known as Demo-2, is on hold following an explosion during a ground test in April that destroyed an earlier vehicle. The Demo-2 mission, whenever it eventually flies, will carry two NASA astronauts to the station for an eight-day mission.

Boeings first piloted test flight, a mission known as CFT, will last a full six months, and that is the flight NASA is counting on to keep the station fully staffed until one or both companies begin operational crew rotation flights.

A lot of the commercial crew dates have been a little bit in flux lately, Meir said. But it does look like we should be seeing the (unpiloted) Boeing flight, I think that will happen during our mission, and Ive been receiving training on the ground to help make sure that that mission is successful.

We do also, of course, hope we see some of the first commercial crew astronauts during our mission. That would be excellent. The key is being flexible and being able to adapt. Thats something our training really allows us to do. Well be ready for any scenario.

The upcoming spacewalks pose the most significant near-term challenge with five needed to install the batteries brought up aboard the HTV-8 spacecraft and up to a half dozen needed to repair the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a high-priority particle physics experiment mounted on the stations power truss.

The AMS instrument was not designed to be repaired by spacewalking astronauts and NASA planners say the EVAs needed to fix a failing pump and carry out other upgrades represent the most complex spacewalks since repairs of the Hubble Space Telescope. The AMS EVAs will be carried out by Parmitano and Morgan.

The battery installation work is not as technically complex, but it poses additional challenges, requiring spacewalkers to work near the limit of the robot arms reach on the far left end of the stations solar power truss. NASA has not yet named the astronauts who will carry out the battery work, but Meir, Koch and Morgan have all been trained.

Im really looking forward to the potential to do a spacewalk, since thats really what Ive always envisioned myself doing, really, my whole life, Meir said.

The stations power truss stretches the length of a football field and features eight huge solar wings, four on each end arranged in pairs. The arrays rotate like slow-motion paddle wheels as the station flies through its orbit to maximize the amount of sunlight reaching the solar cells.

When the station is in sunlight, power is fed directly to the labs myriad electrical systems. At the same time, they re-charge four sets of massive batteries housed at the base of each set of arrays. When the station moves into orbital darkness, the batteries seamlessly kick in to keep the station powered.

The stations eight electrical power channels originally were supported by 48 nickel-hydrogen NiH2 batteries, six per channel. Twenty-four batteries, in two sets of 12, were mounted at the bases of the solar array wings on the starboard, or right, side of the stations main truss with two sets of 12 on the port, or left, side.

But the original batteries have lost strength over the years and NASA is in the process of replacing all four sets with 24 smaller, more efficient lithium-ion Li-Ion batteries. The replacement units pack twice the punch, so only six are needed per set.

The HTV-6 cargo ship delivered the first set of replacements in December 2016. They were installed on the starboard 4, or S4, solar array segment during two spacewalks in January 2017. NASA installed a second set, delivered by the HTV-7 cargo ship, last September on the port 4, or P4 arrays.

The third set, launched Tuesday, will be installed on the far left end, or port 6, segment of the power truss.

Assuming the work goes smoothly, NASA managers hope to begin the AMS repair work in early to mid November. Five to six spacewalks may be necessary.

The $2 billion Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, a project led by Nobel laureate Samuel Ting, was designed to detect high energy cosmic rays and measure any antimatter that might be present to learn more about dark matter, dark energy and by extension, the evolution of the cosmos. The instrument was carried up on the next-to-last shuttle mission and installed in May 2011

Its a pretty incredible piece of machinery, its actually measuring high energy radiation, cosmic rays coming from different stars, it is looking for evidence of antimatter and dark matter to begin to answer more questions about the origin of our universe, Meir said.

Unfortunately, one of the pumps thats vital to the thermal control system of that instrument is broken. Well, its not broken yet, but it is degrading. And so were going to do a series of spacewalks during the mission in order to fix that pump. It wasnt designed to be fixed (in space).

That makes the work kind of like the Hubble Space Telescope scenario where you didnt actually design tools for it or interfaces for it, Meir said. So its a very complex and challenging spacewalk, and were very excited to conduct that during our mission.

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Soyuz ferries three crew members to space station - Spaceflight Now

If NASA is ever going to send astronauts back to the moon by 2024, it's going to need new spacesuits for lunar exploration. But before astronauts ever don those suits on the moon, they'll test "walk" them on the International Space Station in 2023, according to the engineer backing the program.

NASA's Artemis moon program aims to land the first astronauts at the south pole of the moon in 2024, but the agency's current spacesuit design called the Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or EMU is designed for floating spacewalks (also known as extra-vehicular activities or EVAs), not clambering around a rocky, lunar surface.

NASA's in-house Advanced Space Suit Project is one of several spacesuit efforts the agency has pursued in recent years, to develop ways to explore deep space. In November 2016, according to a 2017 NASA Office of Inspector General report, the project centered its efforts on a new generation of EVA suit, now known as the xEMU. And so far, the agency is still holding to its timeline of testing the xEMU in orbit in 2023.

Related: The Evolution of the Spacesuit in Pictures

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

NASA is developing the Exploration Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or xEMU, as a spacesuit for astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program.

(Image credit: NASA)

"We've made a lot of progress and iterated on this design, so now we have a very mature system overall," NASA spacesuit engineer Lindsay Aitchison said Sept. 11 during the American Astronautical Society's Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama.

So far the xEMU has gone through more than 30 runs in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory, the huge swimming pool astronauts use to train for spacewalks, Aitchison said.

The xEMU recently passed its preliminary design review, which is a major development stage showing that the baseline design appears to be operationally effective. Next up is design development testing, Aitchison added, followed by testing a full version of the suit on the ISS in 2023. Only if the spacesuit passes those orbital trials would it be used by astronauts on the lunar surface in 2024.

While the Trump administration only told NASA in March to land on the moon in 2024, the agency has been working on improving its exploration-class (or planetary surface-based) spacesuits for more than a decade. The iconic Apollo moon spacesuit of the 1960s was based on a design that is more than 50 years old, so today's engineers are looking to create something more flexible based on what we have learned about astronauts and human factors since then.

In 2017, the OIG criticized NASA for spreading its recent spacesuit development among multiple programs, resulting in $200 million spent but leaving the agency "years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit capable of replacing the EMU or suitable for use on future exploration missions." At the time, NASA said the report "is a fair assessment of the current state of Extravehicular Activity (EVA) systems", but said the OIG was "overly critical" of the data and products supplied to explain the Constellation Space Suit System contract, which was terminated some years after the George W. Bush-era Constellation moon-to-Mars program was canceled in 2010. NASA added that some of the CSSS deliverables "may be used to reduce risk for current International Space Station (ISS) EVA systems."

More Photos: NASA's Futuristic Z-2 Spacesuit Design in PicturesRelated: NASA's Z-2 Spacesuit: How It Works (Infographic)

Yet the agency appears to be using multiple spacesuit ideas to inform the design of its newer xEMU.

Aitchison mentioned various spacesuit designs that influenced xEMU, all the way back to the early 1990s. Among the spacesuits she cited were ILC Dover's Mark III used in a NASA field testing program called Desert Research and Technology Studies or Desert RATS and the more recent Z-1 spacesuit and Z-2 spacesuit prototypes that ILC Dover and NASA introduced in the last decade.

"NASA has actually been investing in a very methodical matter how we're going to do exploration spacesuit development," Aitchison said, including implementing "lessons learned" from the ISS program. Among the changes: the xEMU suit will have a smaller display unit on the front of the suit, making it easier to fit a wider range of NASA's astronaut population, Aitchison said.

In March, NASA backed away from plans to run the first all-female spacewalk because there were not enough EMU spacesuits immediately available on the ISS, in the correct size, for the two scheduled astronauts to use. Modifying the Hard Upper Torso unit on the EMU for taller (or shorter) astronauts generally takes about 12 hours of work, so NASA elected to shuffle spacewalk assignments rather than take time away from experiments and more urgent repairs on the ISS. Following this situation, NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told the House science committee that future spacesuit designs would better accommodate the range of sizes the astronaut population requires.

Another consideration for xEMU is it will be able to run missions on the future Gateway space station at the moon, as well as for lunar exploration or for landing on Mars, Aitchison said. xEMU's design can be changed to accommodate different missions, she explained, by swapping out some components to keep the astronauts safe in these different environments.

As for ILC Dover, the company (along with Collins Aerospace) introduced an "Astro" suit in August that can be used for floating spacewalks, moon exploration or Mars exploration. The new suit system is aimed at both NASA and commercial space partners for future lunar and Martian exploration.

Follow Elizabeth Howell on Twitter @howellspace. Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom and on Facebook.

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NASA Wants to Test New Moon Spacesuits on the Space Station in 2023 - Space.com