China?

You know, I'm a big space exploration geek, but, over the years, I've come to see a lot of it as money not well spent. Again, I'm a space geek, amateur astronomer, follower of Nasa's and ESA's missions, but, in the end, some of the stuff will just cost too much for not much reward. Sometimes I'm still on the fence though.

Actually, people can't eat money. Money can buy things, but if you change the allocation of money, you change the price of things as well, so linear calculations like "with this amount of money, and math" do not necessarily work out very realistically.

On the other hand, there is already much more than enough food in the world - at least so far, despite huge population growth - so the problem is not that the world would need more food; the problem is allocation and distribution of food. Shortly, lack of market access.

And most big famines are not even about people not being able to afford food as such; they are political.

From your example, Apollo, I'll jump to another example: the best-known modern famine in Ethiopia, 1983-1985. There was local drought in northern Ethiopia, but the government was actually exporting food. The government extracted food from producers so that they themselves had to buy their own food, and at the same time the same government restricted the movement of people.

There was plenty of aid sent, but it was sent to the government that had partially caused the hunger in the first place.

In 1985, Ethiopia had a population of 41 million. Now it has a population of 88 million. And they are not particularly hungry, and this does not even require a lot of money from the Apollo program. But it requires more stable political circumstances in Ethiopia (and things have looked somewhat better after the Soviet-backet government fell in 1991).