When Blue Origin, the space launch company owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, announced that someone had won an auction to ride into space on the company’s New Shepard rocket, a lot of bandwidth was expended on social media about what appeared to be a case of conspicuous consumption. The amount of money, $28 million, paid for a few minutes in space, seemed, to many, to be excessive.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the “democratic socialist” from Vermont, was especially bothered. He said so on Twitter: “Space travel, heavily funded by taxpayers, should not be a plaything for the very rich.”