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Comment by molyss | Hacker News Reader

you're right, it doesn't have to be a zero sum game. They could be cooperating. Only the propensity of either of the competitors to claim their success without acknowledging the other's advancement makes it look like a winner-takes-all game.

As far as space tourism, I feel like it's just that : tourism. Reserved to more and more concentrated elite and pretty short sighted. There's no problem with being excited about it, but it's better to also do something meaningful about it, other than signing a check and posting some cool instagram picture of your 30 seconds vacation. Even if it's just understanding how much effort was put in getting you there.

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Marketplace competition and non-zero-sumness are not mutually exclusive, at least not if you are a capitalist. The total money spent on spaceflight will be larger with both companies in the market than with either one alone, therefore it is not a zero-sum game.

As for acknowledging each others advancements - you don't see Sony or Dell going out of their way to mention Apple, for obvious reasons. This is normal behavior between competitors. I don't see why people are making so much out of Bezos' tweet; it was just a stupid joke.

Maybe because expectations of friendliness are higher when talking about space industry. It still feels more like few entities working towards the same grand goal than companies competing with each other.

The jabs Elon and Bezos are exchanging seemed funny to me at first, but now they seem kind of serious, which makes me uncomfortable. I expected they'll have fun together, not the resentment that seems to be flying between them.

> As far as space tourism,

space tourism will become much cheaper very soon, the last 3 weeks we have had massive accomplishments in space. To get comfortable going to another planet, surely people will need to be normalized to the idea of space, which is what the value of space tourism is, besides the obvious superlative nature of it.

I personally doubt that. No matter what, the fuel will still cost in the $100k, plus the marginal cost of the vehicle, launch authorization, coordination on the ground and having an emergency team ready to dispatch at a moment's notice.

That stuff costs money and if you're only launching 5 people at once, it's still a high sticker for each launch. While "regular" vacation scales pretty well with the number of people you're going with, it's not going to be the case for space exploration.

On a regular vacation, most of the cost overhead for each additional person is the transportation cost. Here, the vacation _is_ the trip

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