SEATTLE — ONE clear winter day in 1909, in Hampshire, England, a young man named Geoffrey de Havilland took off in a twin-propeller motorized flying machine of his own design, built of wood, piano wire and stiff linen hand-stitched by his wife. The launch was flawless, and soon he had an exhilarating sensation of climbing almost straight upward toward the brilliant blue sky. But he soon realized he was in terrible trouble.

The angle of ascent was unsustainable, and moments later de Havilland’s experimental plane crashed, breaking apart into a tangled mass of shards, splinters and torn fabric, lethal detritus that could easily have killed him even if the impact of smashing into the ground did not. Somehow, he survived and Sir Geoffrey — he was ultimately knighted as one of the world’s great aviation pioneers — went on to build an astonishing array of military and civilian aircraft, including the world’s first jet airliner, the de Havilland Comet.

I thought immediately of de Havilland on Friday when I heard that Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo, a rocket-powered vehicle designed to take well-heeled tourists to the edge of space, had crashed on a flight over the Mojave Desert, killing one test pilot and seriously injuring the other. The in-air “anomaly,” as it was first described in a company Twitter posting, comes on top of an explosion in 2007 during a rocket-fuel test that killed three employees on the ground at the Mojave Air and Space Port.

These sacrifices were not just tragic; to many people there was something needless or even obscene about them. Brave men are dead in service of a for-profit venture in which a bunch of thrill-seeking billionaires and Hollywood A-listers have plunked down deposits up to the full $250,000 cost for a ticket to slip the surly bonds for several minutes of floating weightlessness and trophy photography 62 miles above the Earth, at the very edge of our atmosphere. For some whose job it was to make that happen, this has truly been a view to die for.