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 over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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Short Briefings on Long Term Thinking - Baillie Gifford · SpaceX: past, present, future – and finding the next world-changers · 4 Aug 2026 podcast

There isn't an incentive to make a reusable ballistic missile.

The whole point is that it's not.

And so the industry had aggregated around that as a concept.

Reusability allows you to take something that was disposable and make it depreciable instead.

So you can spread that construction cost across many launches and you can access a higher profit margin as a result.

That then gives you the financial freedom to reinvest in the R&D to allow you to achieve even more.

And that's the part of the system which I think many businesses or many founders often at an earlier stage

struggle to optimize for or treat as something that is to be dismissed rather than something that's core to their ability to provide their product at scale.

If you want to do something really transformational in an industry, there's a strong argument that you need the best people in the world to come and help you do that.

The best people in the world have got many job offers.

And so you have to have something distinct in order to be able to attract them to this place.

Being able to offer the top performing engineers a place in the history books is very valuable compared to saying, well, I'll just offer you 10% more than the next person is going to pay you.

Again, from my own personal experience, the thing which drew me to engineering in the first place was that vision of a better future, technological innovation, et cetera.

And so I think people are going to self-select for those kind of visions.

The important nuance though is that

That vision is not mutually exclusive with better, cheaper, and faster.

So in the process of everyone working very hard to realize that what might sound science fiction ambition, you actually develop something that is very commercially compelling along the way.

And I think that's the bit which people missed at the time was this can sound like a billionaire's sort of flight of fancy, but actually it's very economically rational to have that because it has a path dependency towards commerciality as well.

Yeah, so we spend a lot of time before we invest in companies getting to know them from the outside before we get to know them from the inside.

So as part of that, I went to lots and lots of space conferences, both sort of technical and business, and tried to use that to bump into some of the management teams, some of the engineers who were presenting there.

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