a small airtight compartment with controlled pressure and two sets of doors, used to facilitate movement between the interior and exterior of a spacecraft; (also) either of the doors to such a compartment; cf. space lock n.
This term is found as early as 1840 in reference to a submarine.
Through the air-locks the great ships settled into their world.
Help him through the airlock when the tender couples up.
She must put on the suit because the airlock had no independent oxygen or cooling units.
A clearly marked circular disc, a hundred metres in diameter, was centred on the Pole, and Norton had a strong suspicion that this must be the outer seal of an enormous airlock.
The second floor was completely empty, devoid even of temporary fittings. Someone had chalked a large rectangle on the curved plastic panel of the wall and printed inside it: AIRLOCK HERE?
Now LaRoque was putting on a spacesuit in a tool closet twenty meters from an outer airlock.
Dur Tahar laid her ears back and started to go, lingered for one poisonous look beyond, toward the airlock, and a focus snapped back on center.
Anything shoved through the airlock would arrive on the anomaly world.
A slight, athletic figure…braved his way through the RihanFed Border Station toward the helmeted and heavily armed sentry at the single airlock.
Since the airlock could accommodate only two people at a time, the two men had allowed Miho to have her privacy while they waited in the depressurised garage.
As they were walking through the airlock to the pressurized Marscar that had brought them from the hotel, the exhibition produced one final surprise.
You'd have to dock her at the emergency airlock on the primary hull.
Toss them out an airlock?
Then we cycled through the airlock, which happened to be adjacent to the pad where the moonbuses landed.
antedating 1930
Last modified 2020-12-20 18:37:51
In the compilation of some
entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries
in OED.