TROPOLISM

The New York Times spreads word about a second company to enter the race for space-luxury travel, as if it's something to celebrate. A spaceport will be built in the United Arab Emirates. This, of course, is to compete with the Virgin Galactic spaceport promised for Las Cruces, New Mexico. Unfortunately for humanity, and doubly so for those who will shuck out $200,000 for a ticket, they will be flying out of the most crap-ass ground-based aeronautical terminals ever conceived. Yes, even worse than the sub-sub-sub-orbital airports FRA or MDW.

Click the link below to read about the particular grossness of each spaceport...

Virgin Galactic's gateway to sub-orbital space is apparently driven by the "inspired by internationally renowned designer Philippe Starck" logo. Yes, the future is now, and Philippe-Starck-inspired logos will create dumb buildings just to show them off. Like, did he actually design the logo, or not? Check out undergraduate-level Illustrator rendering with the Virgin eye, left.

The UAE spaceport (at the top of this entry), proposed by Space Adventures Ltd. [warning: be sure you have no liquids in your mouth as you launch their hilarious intro movie], looks slightly less like a child's rendering, and slightly more like a NASA space rendering from 1962. The word SPACEPORT is helpfully labelled (in front of the SuperFriends Hall Of Justice-style plaza, complete with lonely fountain and ridiculously small cul-de-sac) so that as you're driving in the remote desert, you don't miss it. However, its little mushroom-pod organization can't even hold a candle to CDG's Terminal 1. Sad.

One would think that the expense of such a flight, and the fact that one experiences the terminals on both arrival and departure (the flights just go up...and come back down), would mean that the terminals would be, you know, gorgeous. The heavenly experience of kind-of-weightlessness is bracketed by completely pedestrian experiences on the ground.