Garage Doors: Future Uses

Many people have imagined just what place garage doors will have in a spacefaring future. This is one author's imagining:
Baruch watched the sun set for the fifteenth time in the past 24-hour-cycle, and that was only including the times when he was awake. Life on the Flaming Sword, otherwise known as the Orbital Surveillance and Defense Platform, was thoroughly disorienting, and he never enjoyed doing the maintenance runs on the solar power units. So mundane, so cramped, bad food, not nearly enough space to stretch, every door a massive, groaning garage door. Perched on a bar for the whole visit, unless some charitable technician donned greaves and deigned to walk Baruch around a bit. His coming, though, the most efficient way of doing the repairs, and he accepted that fact. He had the expertise, for one, and the Guardians with Proxies had an advantage over the humans in a vacuum: Proxies didn’t need oxygen, and could have all the appropriate tools built into their carapace when needed. Unfortunately, limited range of the neural connection required his presence on the station for him to manipulate his Proxy, or else he would have stayed on Earth, where the sky was.
    At least they had semi-instantaneous matter transportation. Lovely gift from the ancients. No more rockets.
    He had just finished welding together a coupling that had been frayed by a hit from a micrometeorite and ordered his Proxy back into the airlock when Lena joined him in the control room, taking her seat next to his perch.
    She was a technician, posted here as a specialist. His interactions with her before this point had been short and perfunctory for a reason.
    “So,” she said, punching a few buttons to lower the sunshield as the rays began to peek around the dark planet’s curve into the observation window. “What do you know about the Awakening is going?”
    Baruch turned his stern face toward her, abrupt and jerky as always. His Voicebox, which he’d programmed with a husky male voice that pronounced its consonants with an unusual sharpness, did the speaking. “I know that it’s tomorrow, but you know that, too. Whatever ‘tomorrow’ means up here.”
    “It’s almost tomorrow already, down in Hope. That’s what I mean.” The tip of South America was nearing the terminus of the dawn. “Almost Christmas.” She gave Baruch a wry grin. “But you don’t care, right?”
    This again. And this would probably be the worst holiday (holy-day is how he pronounced the word) of all, because of the Awakening. Sometimes he really appreciated the fact that he, unlike humans, had no way of expressing emotions facially. His body language was also conveniently dissimilar. If he had lips, though, he would have drawn them tight in consternation.
    “It’s not even the winter solstice they’re celebrating. At least that’s an astronomically significant event.”