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Pictures of the day: How about these hangar doors?

By General Aviation News Staff · September 20, 2015 ·

Size definitely matters when your hangar door has to be big enough to allow access for rockets.

Schweiss Doors, which provides hangar doors of every size from the smallest GA hangar to Cape Canaveral, recently delivered two doors to SpaceX, with one 40 feet wide and 69 feet tall, while the other is 90 feet wide and 61 feet tall.

Both were equipped with automatic latches and are wind-rated to 150 mph. Upon delivery to Florida, both doors were clad in 26-gauge sheeting and feature 4-inch blanket insulation. Bottom-drive 480-volt 3-phase motors and patented Schweiss liftstraps do the lifting of these doors that exceed 53,000 pounds.

A Schweiss Doors bifold liftstrap/autolatch door opens wide to enable spacecraft at Cape Canaveral to be delivered to the launch pad.
he COTS 2 Demo Dragon sits alongside a Schweiss Bifold liftstrap/autolatch door as it undergoes launch prep at the SpaceX hangar in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Men standing in front of one of the SpaceX hangars in Cape Canaveral give a good indication of what a Schweiss custom-made 90 foot x 61 foot tall bifold door actually is
Prior to attaching the exterior sheeting and insulation, the large door is put through a test run from top to bottom to ensure it is in working order
A lot of steel went into this 90 foot x 61 foot door weighing in at 53,000 pounds with attached sheeting and insulation. A dual-autolatch system closes it securely to the space hangar. The huge door required four powerful bottom-drive motors and 31 liftstraps capable of lifting more weight. Five internal and one external truss add to the stability of the door.
A view of the bifold door with exterior sheeting attached. The smaller 40 x 69 foot tall door required three powerful motors and has 16 liftstraps, five internal trusses and one external truss.
When the largest Schweiss bifold liftstrap door is open all the way it has a 52 foot clear opening.

These doors are similar in size to prior Schweiss bifold doors installed at SpaceX sites in Waco, Texas, and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. SpaceX has developed rockets able to deliver cargo to the International Space Station and is working on providing satellite launch services, passenger tourist flights and cargo delivery to orbit … sooner than you think.

“SpaceX is like Special Forces,” says Elon Musk, SpaceX CEO and Chief Designer. “We do the missions that others think are impossible. We have goals that are absurdly ambitious by any reasonable standard, but we’re going to make them happen. We have the potential here at SpaceX to have an incredible effect on the future of humanity and life itself.”

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