Warning: architectural snobbery ahead!

This is actually an old article, but only discovered it recently. It appears that some architectural critics are less than enthused with the designs for spaceports in New Mexico and the UAE. Or, as the headline puts it, future space tourists “will be flying out of the most crap-ass ground-based aeronautical terminals ever conceived.” (One assumes that “crap-ass” is a term of art in architecture.) Read on for the unnamed author’s assessment of the Virgin logo that’s part of the New Mexico design ( “undergraduate-level Illustrator rendering”) or the overall appearance of the UAE spaceport ( “looks slightly less like a child’s rendering, and slightly more like a NASA space rendering from 1962.”) Conclusion: “The heavenly experience of kind-of-weightlessness is bracketed by completely pedestrian experiences on the ground.”