An unmanned rocket owned by the private company Space Exploration Technologies launched Tuesday on the first commercial flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by PayPal's Elon Musk, has spent about $1.2 billion to date -- $400 million of it from NASA -- in its bid to develop private space flight into a viable commercial enterprise. It's been a busy couple of weeks for rich guys with outer space ambitions. In late April, a group including the co-founders of Google and film director James Cameron announced the formation of a startup company with plans to one day mine asteroids for platinum.
Space exploration may one day provide the Earth with tangible benefits. In the short-term, at least, SpaceX can help save the U.S. government the $60 million per person it's paying Russia to transport astronauts to the space station, which, as the joke goes, exists so that the now-canceled space shuttle would have somewhere to go. But we couldn't help thinking, as long as Silicon Valley plutocrats are throwing around hundreds of millions of dollars to solve global problems with questionable economic benefits, there are a few pressing Earth-bound ones they might consider.
HELPING STOP CHILDHOOD MALNUTRITION
In its 2012 challenge report, the Copenhagen Consensus Center -- which convenes economists, including several Nobel Prize winers, to provide cost-benefit analyses of solving various global crises -- ranked efforts to combat childhood malnutrition as its highest priority. (The center is controversial because of its founder Bjorn Lomborg's skepticism about efforts to combat climate change, but its numbers are at least worth considering as a conversation starter.)
According to the center's analysis, a $3 billion investment in interventions to reduce chronic undernutrition in pre-schoolers could reduce it by up to 36 percent in developing countries. In terms of education and health benefits, every dollar spent on combating undernutrition has at least a $30 payoff.
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