Virgin Galactic Makes a Manned Flight: Richard Branson is Much Too Happy

Virgin Galactic released SpaceShipTwo over the Mojave desert on Sunday, reports Jason Paur of Wired News. The first manned craft marked what Virgin’s founder Richard Branson described as “One of the most exciting days in the history of Virgin.”

And he’s right, it’s pretty damn exciting. The spacecraft was released from its White Knight Two mother ship, Eve, at 45,000 feet above earth, and represents the future of high-end vacationing—a technology that will allow anyone with an extra $200,000 to burn to see the earth from outer space and adventure around our galaxy. Virgin Galactic makes an African Safari sound about as exciting as a sixth grade math quiz.

Branson strikes me a taller, business-genius version of Tom Cruise. An alarmingly positive back-slapper, he has a passion for hot air balloon adventures, is almost insanely enthusiastic, and consistently makes inspired, impulsive business decisions. Based on his constant success, I wonder if he’s ever slept more than three hours a night.

And like Tom Cruise, he seems imbalanced. I don’t have a medical or psychology degree, but I do have a therapist, and I’ve unofficially diagnosed both men, and possibly Arnold Schwarzenegger as well, with hypomania—a phsychological imbalance that provides all of the inspired ups of manic depression without any of the downs. My therapist described it as the opposite of depression, and I do not have it. It’s either extremely rare, or almost never diagnosed, because who would want to treat such a delightful chemical anomaly?

While I am not qualified to make this diagnosis, I believe that logic is on my side—it takes deep wells of positive thinking and certainly delusions of grandeur to decide that $200,000 space vacations are what we need right now and then to actually make it happen.

But here’s my issue—where are the inspired hypomanics with a passion for finding renewable energy, reigning in global wierding and creating jobs? Are actual problems too depressing to exist within the blessed scope of these tirelessly ambitious over-achievers? Does it take a certain pension for realism to be inspired to fix existing problems instead of creating new modes of high-end travel?

I’m not sure. I think Elon Musk may be a hypomanic super-man. I also think that hypomanics who work on projects like Branson’s could end up saving civilization on the other end. If global wierding creates an uninhabitable earth, these space vacation rockets may be used as shuttles to our new planet. And surely an imbalanced positive thinker will be responsible for the Rosetta Stone that teaches us to speak alien.