This CEO failed to get an internship with NASA. Now, he owns a $1.8 billion rocket company​

Peter Beck, founder and CEO of Rocket Lab (Image credit: rocketlabusa.com)

It was always Peter Beck's dream to send a rocket into space. But in 2006, when he approached NASA and companies like Boeing to hire him as an intern, he was shown the door. It wasn't because the 28-year-old from New Zealand was not qualified.

Beck had skipped college to take up an apprenticeship with a tools manufacturer so he could learn to work with his hands and play around with model rockets and propellants in his free time. By the time he approached the companies in the US, he had built a steam-powered rocket bicycle that traveled nearly 145 kph. Beck felt his experiments would be able to convince NASA and Boeing, but it didn't work.

"Here’s a foreign national turning up to an Air Force base asking a whole bunch of questions about rockets — that doesn’t look good,” 45-year-old Beck told CNBC Make It. Cut to 2023, Beck is now the owner of Rocket Lab based in California which is worth $1.8 billion. The company has completed more than 35 space launches, including one to the moon with a NASA satellite in 2022.

Speaking to the publication on what made him start his own space startup, Beck said after his trip to the US, he came to know that a few companies were actually making what he wanted to create: lightweight, suborbital rockets to transport small satellites. He also knew that it would be difficult to convince investors to back him when he did not have a college degree and could not even land an internship.

So, on his flight back to New Zealand, he planned his first startup and even drew its logo on a napkin.

Beck launched Rocket Lab later in 2006 and three years later, it became the Southern Hemisphere’s first private company to reach space.

A busy start to the year for Electron with launches from LC-1 in New Zealand and LC-2 in Virginia this quarter. Many more to come in what is shaping up to be our most active launch year yet: https://t.co/5LgQDHqNyh pic.twitter.com/0wwiH0E6iK

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) March 27, 2023

Talking about why he decided to start his own company immediately after failing to get a job in aerospace, Peter Beck told CNBC Make It, "One of the things I’m always frustrated with is how long everything takes. Ask anybody who works around me: There’s a great urgency in everything. I don’t walk upstairs, I run upstairs. As we’ve grown as a company, it’s always a sprint. I wish things would get faster. I’m always battling time."

Just seven days after our last launch, Electron has delivered mission success once again. Two launches from two continents just days apart - that's responsive space access in action. #TheBeatGoesOn pic.twitter.com/WmphQY1qbi

— Rocket Lab (@RocketLab) March 24, 2023

One of the biggest challenges Beck faced was financing Rocket Lab. "Nothing happens without funding in this business. When I first started Rocket Lab, I ran around Silicon Valley trying to raise $5 million," he told the publication.

"At that time, that was an absurd amount of money for a rocket startup. A rocket startup was absurd (in general), it was only SpaceX then. A rocket startup from someone living in New Zealand was even more absurd."

Then the company decided to raise really small amounts of funding. The experience made them efficient and "absolutely laser-focused" on execution. "The hardest thing (we did) is actually the thing that shaped the company into the most successful form it could be," Beck said.

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