Well that one word also applies to valuation as well, exploding is something an App doesn't need to worry about. The failure opportunities for Space X are much more crippling and public in scope. They are operating in a very risky technology area and it may be that its hard to get investors to just throw money at it.

That may change if they can get the launch prices down to the projected $5-7 million range.

It may. Given that claims of cheap access to space have been around since the 60s, however, people are understandably cautious about this one. Everyone talks about economically recoverable expendable liquid boosters (planned for Saturn V derivatives, as an upgrade for the Energia Zenit boosters, and so on), but no-one had done it yet, never mind established that it can actually be done cheaply.

In July, SpaceX successfully soft-landed a Falcon 9 first stage in the Atlantic. Now that they've proved they can do it, they're going to try over land next.

So they're already very close to the dream of a liquid booster that you can just land, refuel, and relaunch.

The Soviets were also very close to that dream for some time, without ever getting it economical. The US was kind of doing it with solid boosters for decades, but again the economics were dubious; it would practically have been cheaper to build new ones (and I believe that's the plan for the SLS; the solid boosters won't be recovered).

Don't get me wrong, it'll be great if they manage it, but I don't think it's as easy as people seem to assume.

I don't think it is easy, but I do thank that they have very nearly solved that difficult problem.

Well, they have been working on it steadily for 12 years now.

True, yet so depressing

Advertising is a zero-sum game and is in theory capable of consuming (i.e. wasting) an infinite amount of resources, so it's not really good for comparing with space launches.

How is advertising zero sum?

It is true that ad spends generally result in diminishing returns, however diminishing returns are far from zero sum.

In industries subject to economies of scale advertising is actually really good for economic efficiency and does not at all waste resources rather causing them to be used more effectively.

Because after the initial period of your customers not knowing about a whole category of products, you're just spending money on getting people come to you instead of to a competitor. It's zero-sum, because what you and your competitors spend on ads mostly cancel out - you're competing for a limited, finite pool of customers.

It's zero sum for the advertisers - for each ad spot, there can only be one ad, so if I win the auction, you lose. Of course, since it's an auction, the winner will be spending increasing amounts of money on it, with no real upside (still the same amount of ads displayed).

It's all very good money for the ad platform/brokers.