Of all the major news stories that have broken during my lifetime, the Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo disaster in late October was the first that made people eager to hear my opinion of a big event. I am no expert in space travel—I am not an engineer, nor am I an astrophysicist; I am a novelist. But my novel, God Is an Astronaut, opens with a very similar incident: the fatal explosion of a space tourism shuttle.

The details are different, and, of course, the similarities are nothing more than coincidental. Still, it was a bit eerie to sit at the breakfast table, flip through the Washington Post, and see the headline, “Spacecraft Is Found in Fragments in Desert.” I felt like I’d entered my own novel, and its catastrophe was no longer purely hypothetical.

Experts are still piecing together the enormously complicated events that led to the demise of SpaceShipTwo—a disaster that unfolded with incredible speed. The causes will only be fully understood by a minuscule group of people with advanced degrees in engineering and physics. The effects of the accident, though, go far beyond the realms of the mechanical and the esoteric. They have consequences that even we laypeople can understand. The crash was tragic: a 39-year-old man is dead; his copilot, who was seriously injured, escaped a similar fate only by parachuting to safety. If the flight had not been a test run—if passengers had been aboard—the toll would undoubtedly have been greater.

More than 40 years after Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon—in an era when we all carry around more processing power in our pockets than was once used to guide rockets—it’s easy to be lulled into thinking of space travel as old hat. SpaceShipTwo is a painful reminder of the forces we’re still up against. We haven’t yet bested the powerful physical forces that keep us tethered to this planet. We haven’t conquered the immense vastness of space. Not even close. There are limits to our technology—to what we can do and where we can go. It doesn’t make for a good inspirational poster, but there it is.

Virgin founder Richard Branson, for one, has pledged to continue his quest. He said that he and members of his family will be among the first people on board the next Virgin Galactic flight when service is resumed. Branson isn’t the only one enamored of space flight. Before the crash, more than 700 people had plunked down a serious amount of dough to reserve their seats on upcoming Virgin Galactic flights. (The size of that deposit—roughly the cost of an Ivy League education—is a problematic and inevitable sidebar to this story.) Some of those aspiring astronauts are now, no doubt, scouring the fine print on their contracts, reading up on the specifics of Virgin’s refund policy. But others have already come out and declared that the accident has not scared them off. When the time comes, they still plan on counting down and blasting off.

I can’t blame them. As I was working on my novel, many people asked me, “If you had the chance to take a trip into space, would you do it?” To which I always answered emphatically: “Hell yes. I’d be first in line, brandishing my golden ticket and zipping up my spacesuit.”

For years, I carried around a magazine clipping by an astronaut who had been aboard the International Space Station. He talked about the experience of watching the planet from a God-like vantage. I’ve since lost those pages, but his images stay with me: the way lightning glimmers above the ocean; the pure, desolate blackness of space; a sunrise every 45 minutes. It led me to believe that there are some things so rarefied, so sublime, and so lovely that having the chance to see them was worth forking out almost any amount of money—worth braving almost any risk.

Almost. It’s easy to be bold when dealing with hypotheticals.

The Virgin story—which is all too real—forces me to contemplate that question again. The human desire to risk everything in order to experience something extraordinary is either deeply foolhardy or profoundly admirable. Lately, I can’t decide which. And I may never fully understand the logistics or the liabilities of space travel. But I think I understand why we’ll keep trying.

Alyson Foster received her M.F.A. from George Mason University. Her fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. God Is an Astronaut, published by Bloomsbury in July, is her first novel.