Luke Ward
speaker
235 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 4 Aug
Luke Ward’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Yeah, so this probably started during my engineering degree in mechanical engineering.
And it was around that time that the space shuttle was being decommissioned.
And there wasn't an obvious successor to that in space exploration.
Post the financial crisis, there wasn't really the budget to support a big investment there as well.
And so for me, many of the other people on the course, it was a bit depressing that we weren't really pushing the frontiers in the same way that we'd maybe been led to believe from growing up on this diet of science fiction.
But there were a few companies and entrepreneurs who were taking the risk on developing rockets of their own.
SpaceX was one of them, although nowhere near as famous in the public eyes at that time, but held up as a place where it would be an aspirational place to go and work for.
That sort of stuck in the back of my mind as I became an investor and looking at many more traditional industries and still kept an eye on this company.
And it was in 2015 when it demonstrated reusability, so the ability to land and recover one of these rockets.
that I think I had the confidence to suggest to colleagues that this might actually be an area that is investable for our clients and it could actually be something that could be profitable rather than something that's usually the preserve of governments and is associated with cost rather than capability.
Yeah, so trying to make the point that culturally this company is quite different.
That's maybe a bit of an evocative way to do it in a research note, but I think it hopefully got people's attention.
The point being that if you structured a company the same way as we'd always done, optimizing for the political reality of budgets rather than the blank sheet of paper afforded by billionaire status, for example,
you would end up with a company that just does something very similar to the past.
And if that was the case, then it's not something which is really going to become a standout investment.
For a company to transform its market, it needs to reimagine it.
And this was what I think SpaceX, in addition to the product innovations it developed, was the real sort of mindset innovation in how to tackle this problem.
It's all well and good for products to be better, but if they're not cheaper as well, it's hard to see how they'll be adopted at scale.
And this was the perennial problem in rocket launch is that rockets are disposable.
The heritage comes from military and ballistic missiles.
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