Garage doors may seem important to you and your home- keeping your car (or your stuff) safe and clean and rain-free. But garage doors actually play a much more important and vital role in space: they keep the airless vacuum out of a space shuttle.
Well, they may not actually be called garage doors in space, but they definitely serve the same function: to partition inside from outside in a large space that opens up into a large room. But in space, these doors require a much tighter seal and much more powerful opening and closing mechanisms. They also need to be double air-locked: there is a transition room, where a space walker (astronaut) stands that is still "inside" the shuttle/ship, and then the outside doors open, allowing the air out and the cold in (the astronaut is already in a suit by this point) and then the astronaut can enter outdoors. Then the room is sealed off, waiting for the space walker's return.
After repairs have been made, photographs taken, outsides cleaned, or whatever the specific task was, the astronaut is tugged back in by a chord linking him or her to the spacecraft and re-enters the decompression chamber. Then the doors are sealed again, air is pumped into the chamber, and the astronaut can enter the spaceship proper again. Then of course he or she needs to take off the suit, which is a long and arduous process, but that is somewhat besides the point. The point is the double-teired system of opening and closing doors that insulates the shuttle itself form decompression and the vacuum of space.
It is a complex system that depends heavily on the design of engineers and the ability of these doors to seal perfectly with their openings. It is an extremely delicate process where mistakes can lead to disaster and or death.
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