IN AN IDEAL WORLD, I would be packing my bags at this minute and checking via phone to see if the 10:17 a.m. shuttle to the Orbital Space Station was blasting off on time. But reality - in the shapely form of my wife - tells me we are booked into a bed and breakfast in Wales. Besides which, it's my turn to feed the cats.

I've nothing against Wales, mind you. The people there are kind, even if they do show an unnatural interest in leeks. Maybe being stuck with a language that sounds like a series of uncontrolled gargles and gasps and has a virtual corner on the world's supply of C's and W's and Y's does that sort of thing to you.

It's just that I've always had this hankering to go flitting through the heavens aboard a spaceship. Watching all the world's oceans and rivers and other assembly points for our daily detritus sweep by unsmelled and safely well beneath my feet. Viewing the moon in a smogless sky. Trying to use the toilet in zero gravity without getting pee in my eyebrows.

Actually, this dream (my wife blames it on all those bachelor meals of corned beef hash and occasionally shared cat food when times were really tough) was born in the days when I was a young journalist covering the astronaut program at Cape Canaveral and later at the Houston Manned Spaceflight Center.

My view was (and remains) that astronauts, as versed as they are in vector analysis and three-sigma factors and three-body orbital mechanics, were singularly lacking in imagination and were missing the whole point of jetting about through space - the "gee whiz" factor, the capability of being awed and amazed and expressing it to other folk.

It was with all good intention of rectifying this lamentable lack of the human touch that I submitted to Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut of the time, my application to become a spaceman/reporter for NASA, a veritable Shakespeare of the skies, a Shelley of the spheres, an Ovid in orbit, a. . . well, you get the idea.

Slayton didn't. His letter of rejection allowed as how of the eight major criteria, I fitted only one - weight, about 130 pounds at the time - and even that was questionable, since my weight control technique seemed geared to a luncheon diet of coffee with milk, six sugars and brandies at the Escape Velocity Press Club.

But what goes round comes round, as they say. Now I read that one Dennis Tito, of Santa Monica, Calif., has signed on to become the first "space tourist." A Netherlands-based company called MirCorp, which is providing funds to support Russia's Mir space station, says Tito is already in training for a flight to Mir in early 2001.

At last, I figured, space was about to become the last frontier for tourism and I was ready to leap into line behind Tito - until I read the dollar signs and instantly rediscovered that every silver lining has a cloud.

Jeffrey Lenorovitz, a spokesman for MirCorp, says Dennis's roundtrip ticket (at least I assume it's roundtrip) will cost about $20 million.

I was looking at something more in the 500- to 1,000-buck range, my bank manager was looking for a 20 percent discount or at least some reasonably solid collateral, and my wife Elizabeth was looking like someone who just discovered she was married to the granddaddy of all fruit bats.

Anyway, while I'm waiting for the price to come down a tad, I've been doing some checking into Mir. As a prospective tourist trap, the space station has all the attractions of a house trailer that came out fifth best in a demolition derby, or a Winnebago that took a wrong turn and drove into World War II.

The thing was built to last five years. It is now in its 14th year. Its accident record is borderline Titanic with a smidgen of the Wreck of Ol' 97 - solar panels turned into punchboards in a collision with a cargo ship, an onboard fire that threatened to parboil the cosmonauts if the oxygen leak didn't get them first, a computer that had had enough, muttered the PC equivalent of "Nyet, yet" and promptly went into a giant sulk.

"Things go wrong in space all the time," NASA Administrator Dan Goldin opined around that time. Oh, that's just dandy. That'll really pull in the Louis Vuitton set when orbiting motels go looking for business: "Welcome to Spaced-Out Inn of Happiness - Get Your Emergency Oxygen Tanks Here and Watch Out for Holes and Passing Meteors."

When asked how Dennis Tito intended to spend his seven to 10 days as a tourist astronaut aboard the battered old Mir, the MirCorp's Lenorowitz said that remained an open question. I would suggest that a spot of DIY, a bit of plastering over holes, patching up a few loose tiles, taking a plunger to the toilet and hammering out a few dents might be in order.

If that's the sort of accommodation that's on offer aboard Space Station Mir these days, Tito had just as well hang the spacesuit in the closet and head for the nearest Hotel El Dumpo. The rooms aren't any great shakes there, either, but the beer is better, you get reruns of "Star Trek" and you don't have to worry about your eyes turning into projectile mush because the air suddenly upped and left.

When you think about it, spending 20 million bucks to practice masochism at 17,500 miles an hour in a gigantic vacuum, where a bit of primordial gunk the size of a dot can turn your innards into cosmic squat in a nanosecond, should be just about enough to buy you a long, relaxed stretch in a stately home for the bewildered.

Anyway, I'm claustrophobic. Now, that walk on the Welsh side along the Pembrokeshire coast does look mighty tempting. Those coal mines sound just fascinating. Leek soup, anyone?

Thought for the Week: Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone.

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