Any serious accident would also drive the cost up considerably and cause delay, not what investors would want. Even NASA, with its Shuttle disasters, found costs way up, schedules destroyed, and even the ISS mission compromised. A private business would be hard pressed to keep going at all.
I would agree with that. I will also say that I think a certain concern got away with a lot more than Rutan did here though. Rutan didn’t know there was the posibility of a serious accident for ten days to two weeks, get notification of it, then ignore the issue until the inevitable took place. And that’s basicly how I see it. This not being addressed, I’m still smoldering over it.