As spacewalks resume, change is coming to the International Space Station

Two residents of the International Space Station were able stretch their legs on Tuesday as they took a walk outside their cozy confines to fix the station's orbiting laboratory -- the first spacewalk in months.

NASA astronaut Reid Wiseman and German astronaut Alexander Gerst stepped out into the airless vacuum of space at 8:30 this morning. It is expected to take at least 6.5 hours to finish their maintenance tasks.

This is the first spacewalk for Wiseman and Gerst, but it's unlikely to be the last. With plans to rearrange several of the docking ports on the orbiting space station, the ISS crews will be required to make at least eight more spacewalks in the coming weeks. The station's robotic arm will handle most of the major reorganization work, but the astronauts will need to manually re-route power to the new docking ports.

NASA is live-streaming the spacewalk and the work of engineers at mission control on their website.

The astronauts were relegated to their station confines for the last several months -- unable to venture outside to make repairs or perform any routine maintenance -- because of a suspected problem with the battery that powers the astronauts' spacesuits. New batteries were recently delivered to the station by the unmanned SpaceX Dragon cargo ship.