It is often said that if we want to achieve something fast, we have to do it alone, but if we want to go far, we better do it together. In other words, for space science missions, on the one hand, we may use competition to move faster and cooperation to achieve more. Indeed, cooperation missions involve issues of close coordination that may slow down processes and increase costs, since a significant part of the savings will be used in pooling resources together as well as a more complex development phase. On the other hand, competition enhances the visibility of leadership and the political impact, leading to faster and more efficient processes and even increased budgets. In fact, these general remarks may also be relevant in application programs providing services, but in space science, the benefits of cooperation are much more important than those of competition, of course in the case of successful cooperation, the ultimate goal is to foster cooperation to maximize the science output of a mission that uses public funding in promoting the advance of scientific knowledge.