After quitting his semiconductor-engineering job last year, 35-year-old Jacob Keeton left his hometown of Beaverton, Ore., and embarked on a 12,000-mile road trip across America and back. Over the span of 11 weeks, Keeton drove through Idaho, Utah, Oklahoma and many other states, visiting over a dozen national parks on his journey.
The ultimate destination and reason behind Keeton’s voyage was an unassuming six square miles of land hugging the Atlantic Ocean. For decades, Wallops Island, Va., has been home to a NASA rocket-testing facility. More recently, it’s begun to accommodate launch pads for an aerospace company called Rocket Lab (RKLB). Keeton has accumulated tens of thousands of Rocket Lab shares and become a millionaire, brokerage documents reviewed by MarketWatch show.
For Keeton, it’s been a dream come true. “I’ve been a sci-fi nerd and space fan my whole life,” Keeton told MarketWatch. He now identifies as “semi-retired,” attributing his work status to the 40 hours a week or more he spends monitoring his Rocket Lab investment and the space industry at large.
“I haven’t got to visit the other facilities yet, but they’re all marked on my Google Maps,” Keeton said. “I’ve searched imagery of every kind from every facility. I’ve looked up tax records for anything that might have some nugget of information.” He’s even bought satellite imagery to track Rocket Lab’s construction progress at Wallops.
Keeton also made a pit stop in Florida to see 28-year-old accountant and fellow space investor Brett Krieger. Together, Krieger, Keeton and a third collaborator known anonymously as Space Investor host a weekly Tuesday live audio broadcast on X, drawing listeners ranging from thrill-seeking retail investors to NASA scientists. Krieger and Space Investor have seen the value of their portfolios inflate to millions of dollars over the past two years as Rocket Lab shares exploded by over 2,300%, to $108 as of Tuesday, and its market valuation reached $63 billion.
The trio – who met on X through Rocket Lab discussion threads – made risky bets on a company whose success once seemed just about impossible. They are part of a crew of swashbuckling space enthusiasts and retail traders who explored for riches in the cosmos and now look smart on the eve of the blockbuster SpaceX IPO. These stargazers evoke comparisons to the investor cults that have surrounded stocks like Palantir (PLTR). While there is some overlap – Krieger currently owns Palantir shares and Space Investor has traded them in the past – investing large sums of money in rocket science demands a unique degree of grit and idealism veering on masochism.
Krieger’s investment plunged him into an open-source intelligence community that obsessively tracks every crumb of Rocket Lab news and data. “There are people going over to the New Zealand facilities every day, taking pictures of the Neutron progress or tracking planes, boats and shipping supplies over to Virginia,” Krieger said.
For decades, space exploration stagnated under the purview of bureaucracy-steeped government processes. Many scientists viewed Elon Musk’s mission of building a private spaceflight company with contempt as SpaceX rocket launches failed one after another, incinerating some of Musk’s personal fortune and putting his companies on track for bankruptcy in 2008.
Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck seemed to stand even less of a chance when he founded the company in 2006, as an amateur rocketeer with no college degree and no funding. Beck hails from the southern tip of New Zealand, a country whose dominant industries are dairy products and tourism. But Beck had the crazy idea of creating a small rocket that would make frequent and cheap trips to space. As Beck later recalled on the “Relentless” podcast, in the early days he would scavenge for spare parts in junkyards to save money.
Today, Rocket Lab’s small-lift Electron rockets act like outer-space Ubers, delivering clusters of satellites into custom trajectories on behalf of imaging companies, government agencies and researchers. Electron is the second-most-launched U.S. rocket, trailing only SpaceX’s Falcon 9. The company has also built its own vertically integrated satellite-manufacturing division.
For his contributions to the New Zealand aerospace industry, Beck was knighted in 2024. “We all call him Sir Peter Beck out of respect,” Krieger said.
Rocket Lab has yet to turn a profit. The company is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars building Neutron, a much larger rocket scheduled to be test-launched on Wallops at the end of this year. The stock trades at a rich valuation multiple, 100 times trailing sales, according to FactSet.
But against all odds, Rocket Lab and other private space companies have created a vibrant commercial ecosystem at a time when space is once again capturing the hearts and minds of mankind. SpaceX’s impending public listing has sparked an industry-wide rally in space stocks. Missile defense systems, orbital data centers, asteroid mining and Mars colonies: The final frontier beckons with untold riches and glory that Rocket Lab and others are racing to claim.
Rocket Lab’s loyal supporters are confident that Beck and the company will be successful. “He’s a madman genius,” Space Investor said.
‘I sold half of my portfolio to pay down my house, car and all my debt’
Rocket Lab successfully completed 21 Electron launches in 2025.
Keeton first heard about Rocket Lab when he was a college student studying mechanical engineering, following the inaugural launch of its Electron rocket in 2017. His classes included satellite design and orbital mechanics, and he worked on a university project to build the base station for a ground launch system. When rumors swirled in March 2021 that Rocket Lab planned to go public via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company, Vector Acquisition Corp., Keeton jumped in and bought 200 shares of the SPAC.
Rocket Lab officially debuted on the Nasdaq COMP in August 2021. Over the next few years, Keeton accumulated as much as 50,000 shares of the company even as the stock bottomed at $3.53 a share in April 2024.
Keeton’s average cost per share was $6.36 in September 2024, according to brokerage records. As Rocket Lab increased the cadence of its Electron launches and reported a blowout quarter in November 2024, the stock shot up.
At the beginning of 2026, Keeton trimmed his Rocket Lab position as his portfolio hit a peak of $6.4 million. Keeton now holds around 11,000 shares of Rocket Lab; brokerage records viewed by MarketWatch show that Keeton has realized over $3 million in Rocket Lab gains. Keeton has invested in other space names such as AST SpaceMobile (ASTS), but he noted that Rocket Lab has always been his biggest holding. On top of buying and holding, Keeton likes to trade momentum-based options, he said.
The “space craze” was what lured Space Investor back to stock picking after a decade on the sidelines. “I’ve always been looking to the stars…watching ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Star Wars,’ all of that,” Space Investor said. In his free time, he builds Lego rockets and model rocket kits with his children. “We launch rocket models every summer together,” Space Investor said.
Making risky investments and borrowing excessively had nearly bankrupted him during the financial crisis, Space Investor told MarketWatch, but the 2019 public debut of space-tourism company Virgin Galactic (SPCE) inspired Space Investor to set aside a few thousand dollars into a “YOLO” account.
Space Investor initiated a position in Rocket Lab in 2023 after reading “When the Heavens Went on Sale,” a book about the commercial spaceflight industry starring new space startups like Rocket Lab, Planet Labs (PL), Astra Space and Firefly Aerospace (FLY). Impressed by author Ashlee Vance’s description of Beck’s dogged determination, Space Investor aggressively built up his position as shares of Rocket Lab fell. He set buy orders for 100 shares every 10-cent drop, accumulating up to 10,000 shares of Rocket Lab for as little as $3.50 per share, according to brokerage documents.
Over the past year, Space Investor says his portfolio of space stocks – which also included names like AST SpaceMobile and Redwire (RDW) – crossed the $1 million mark. “I sold half of my portfolio to pay down my house, car and all my debt,” Space Investor said.
Space Investor would only speak on condition of anonymity. MarketWatch reviewed Space Investor’s brokerage records and verified his identity.
Wall Street takes off
Over the past 18 months, institutional investors have joined the Rocket Lab trade and their participation in the stock has steadily grown, leading Needham analyst Ryan Koontz to initiate coverage of the stock in April 2025. Like the retail crowd, institutional investors have been charmed by Beck and his executive team, which Koontz believes is a major selling point for Rocket Lab.
Rocket Lab successfully completed 21 Electron launches in 2025, giving Wall Street a major boost of confidence in the company. “There’s a heavy fixed cost to running multiple launch facilities,” Koontz told MarketWatch. “If you’re not doing enough launches, it shows up in your margins, and it’s not pretty.” Rocket Lab’s gross margins reached a record high of 38.2% in the most recent quarterly report, up from 28.8% a year ago, according to company filings.
