Jeff Foust talked to Burt Rutan at yesterday’s rollout.
Rutan confirmed that the investigation was causing “a lot” of design changes for SS2. “We have not worked on SpaceShipTwo in a year,” he said, “because there’s a possibility that the propulsion system would be markedly different and we’d be building things that we would have to scrap.”
So they’ve essentially lost a year due to the accident. I wonder if they’ll finally switch over to a liquid system? It would save them quite a bit in ops costs, I’d think.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s more on the subject from Rob Coppinger, who interviewed Burt.
Or, subcontract the development of the hybrids to a firm that actually had some exprience doing it. If they went about developing a liquid system the same way they approached doing a hybrid system, I wonder what the results would be?
I think they drank too much of their own koolaid about how safe hybrids were, and thought that anyone could do it.