Spacewalk spectacle is a disquieting sight

Back in the day, a spacewalk was a spectacular and risky feat. Nowadays, in the age of the International Space Station and the need to regularly maintain and upgrade it, spacewalks are more commonplace but still carry an element of risk. Until this week, only 263 people worldwide had walked in space.

On Thursday, American billionaire Jared Isaacman, a 41-year-old tech entrepreneur from New Jersey, became the first nonprofessional astronaut to perform a spacewalk. He also was the first to pay for the privilege.

Isaacman, who made his fortune by starting the payment processing company now known as Shift4 Payments at age 16 in his parents’ basement, is bankrolling the Polaris Dawn mission, the first of three to be conducted aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft. Each is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Back in 2021, Isaacman also funded and led as commander the first private, all-civilian crew to orbit Earth, also in a SpaceX capsule. The price tag for those four seats: an estimated $200 million.

It’s tempting to write this off as just another rich guy’s vanity trip — more fleeting but more thrilling than buying a luxury yacht — but Isaacman does have a long-standing and genuine interest in space and some bona fides. He’s a licensed pilot qualified on several military jets, owns a company that trains fighter pilots, has performed in airshows with his own team, and set a world record for circumnavigating the globe in a light jet, which he did as a fundraiser for the Make-A-Wish Foundation in New Jersey.

It’s also true that NASA in particular and space exploration in general have benefited from partnerships with private businesses — like Elon Musk’s SpaceX — some of which have proved nimbler and more innovative than governments. In his brief spacewalk, Isaacman — who was followed by fellow crew member Sarah Gillis, a SpaceX engineer — tested the viability of new, much slimmer spacesuits Musk hopes to use on planned flights to Mars.

So there was a legitimate scientific reason for the flight.

Still, the spectacle of the uber-wealthy buying seats on spaceflights — plenty of other rich, would-be space travelers are making reservations — is disquieting. Sure, when you make your money honestly off your own talent, creativity and drive, you can spend it however you want. It’s the American way, after all, no matter how dire the rest of the world’s needs.

But how sustainable is that as income inequality trends upward again in this country and around the world?

It’s an old story, of course, with new details. As long as the world has had money, people have had unequal amounts of it. Economists say we’re getting closer to the disparities that peaked in the so-called Gilded Age, around the previous turn of the century. Back then, the extreme poles were occupied by Andrew Carnegie and his steelworkers, John D. Rockefeller and his oil drillers, and Henry Ford and the people on his assembly line.

Nowadays, it’s people who start billion-dollar startups and workers taking two or three jobs to get by, Taylor Swift making $13.6 million per concert and parents quitting jobs because they can’t afford child care, and a tech entrepreneur funding $200 million joy rides in space.

I don’t pretend to have any great answers here beyond a general belief that those who have much should give much — and plenty of them do. But when we live in a world where the top 10% of the richest folks account for almost half of global emissions, when wealthy people in Southern California can fund their own sand restoration projects to protect the beaches in front of their homes and their less-well-off neighbors up and down the coast cannot, when our nation is about to spend more than $2 billion on a presidential election in which affordability is a major issue, the optics are troubling.

 n COLUMNIST MICHAEL DOBIE’S opinions are his own.

By Michael Dobie

michael.dobie@newsday.commwdobie

Michael Dobie is a member of the Newsday editorial board.