Competing to see who can build a better rocket first isn't destroying each others work (i.e., not even close to the same as war). It seems on the surface that

Competing to see who can build a better rocket first isn't destroying each others work (i.e., not even close to the same as war). It seems on the surface that working together instead of competing would be more productive, but have you ever tried to work on a mega huge engineering team? It's generally not more effective than a smaller team. So why not have several relatively smaller teams working on the same thing in parallel, egging (or even cheering) each other on as they go?