If you have enough extra money lying around it’s quite possible that you’ve already booked one of the seats on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, set to launch sometime in 2010. There are plenty of good reasons to get on board: the spirit of adventure, being among the first humans to slip the surly bonds of earth, and so on…

But perhaps the best reason to get a seat at the dawn of commercial space travel is so that you can experience it before it begins its long slide into becoming the same kind of life-sucking bureaucratic nightmare that air travel is today.

One of the saddest stories of the 20th century is the fate of air travel. In 1900 it was a dream, feverishly speculated upon, subject to all manner of Jules Verne imaginings; by 1999 it was a chore, a tedious, uncomfortable ritual undertaken in order to get from A to B.

That’s how Owen Hatherley starts a wonderful essay on the state of air travel over at the New Statesman. Much of the blame, in his view, belongs to the institution of the airport, which he describes as a “warren-like combination of the shopping mall and the high-security prison.” Fans of Douglas Adams, of course, cannot read any description of the airport and not immediately recall the famous opening lines of The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the phrase, “as pretty as an airport.”

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk Airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Adams is describing Heathrow circa 1988, but it seems that not a lot has changed since then. Twenty years after the publication of Tea Time, here’s how Hatherley describes the opening of Heathrow’s Terminal Five.

Terminal Five is majestic: a thrillingly Constructivist space, with huge spans of glass and steel, open to the expanse of the surrounding airfield. Yet within weeks of opening, 28,000 bags were lost, and 500 flights cancelled. And to ensure that people milling around in limbo keep themselves busy spending money, the terminal only has 700 public seats. Today, amid the airline bankruptcies, an advert declares “Terminal Five is working”, as if we should be impressed.

Hatherley’s essay reviews two new books, Naked Airport, a cultural history of “the world’s most revolutionary structure” by Alastair Gordon and Politics at the Airport, a collection of academic essays edited by Mark B. Salter of the University of Ottawa. Both sound like they are worth a read.

The title of Gordon’s book comes from a quote by Le Corbusier who apparently said “the airport should be naked”, and suggested placing them in the middle of cities, like railway stations, without any thought given to the logistics of actually landing planes or allowing them to take off.

When it comes to air travel, it seems, cold hard realities have always gotten in the way of big dreams. Today it is the economic realities of air travel that are truly destroying the fantasy of flying around the globe. Rising oil prices, deregulation and the emergence of discount carriers have thoroughly democratized the experience. Leaving aside the ecological problems of air travel, it is a wonderful thing that anyone can afford to do it, it’s just a shame that it is no more exciting than riding the bus and, because of security worries, a whole lot more hassle.

If commercial space travel ever becomes a useful way to get around, rather than just a novelty for the wealthy, it is inevitable that the same thing will happen to it. So, if you have the means, gather ye space miles, while ye may.