That's hardly a "the US sucks in space!" result. It's not even a "the US is not leading in Space" result because 81% gave answers that have the US as sole the leader or one leader among "several" others.
This.
It very well may (and I honestly, truly yearn it will) indeed change in the very near future, but I understand that the poll concerned the situation as it stands *right now* (i.e. current reality, not hopeful expectation or wishful thinking). And one thing I learned very soon early on in engineering studies (as opposed to business studies, which perhaps not too coincientally are abbreviated as BS) is that you can *never* rely that *anything* at all "is surely going to change soon" the way you want or hope it to do...
This is probably one of those fundamentally intractable differences of opinion, but to me personally *human* space exploration (i.e. physically "being there" as a sentient being) is the absolute crown jewel of space exploration. I am completely convinced that one single astronaut is able to do more valuable scientific work in one single eight hour working day on the Earth's Moon than a lunar rover could do in at least two weeks of around the clock activities, and taking communication delays and the resulting snail's pace of current Mars rovers into account, I would extremely conservatively estimate the ratio to be less than one astronaut working day versus one 24/7 month of rover utilization (and that's probably a very low ball estimate, looking at the utterly unimpressive accumulated surface speeds of all Mars rovers so far). In time scales, it's probably like evaluating a planetray surface panorama in one fell swoop versus trying to view it almost pixel by pixel though a borescope.
Historically speaking yes, but in the present (which those polls were targeting) you're always only as good as your last success or failure vs. those of your competitors, especially if you're currently riding on their coattails in terms of having to hitch rides for your astronauts. Imagine a Soviet Lend/Lease program for the USA in WWII.
You have to take the scientific return of results per mission into account. I contend that human missions are *immensely* more fruitful per launch and duration than robotic ones, because of the presence of human intelligence and associated real time analysis, adaptation, and agility in situ.
Landing reusable boosters (although it's a definite advance for space *transportation*, an absolutely worthy goal) does not have any direct correlation to space exploration, and neither does being "*on the verge of* flying THREE manned capsules" as opposed to actually have flown them safely to orbit and back with crew on board. Rovers'n orbiters'n probes fer sure're nice, but *China* landed on the far side of the Moon, and frankly I don't really care even minimally to anally compile a list of all the other uncrewed exploration missions anybody else around this little globe of ours is busy trying to accomplish these days. Once again, to me *human* space exploration is what really counts and dominates for the reasons outlined above. That's what *true* leadership means. Step up, USA.
Once again, even if the US "still runs the largest human spaceflight program in the world", it currently does so having to rely on someone else's crew space transportation capabilities. In my view, in the bigger picture though there has actually been an absolutely breathtaking amount of stagnation. I'm a pessimist by nature, but after Apollo even I expected for the longest time that humans would have landed on Mars a few years ago at worst. Yet here we are, half a century later, still just endlessly going around the Earth in circles. At its very core, exploration is about pushing outwards and expanding the envelope, and that hasn't happened in human space exploration for decades. It's not just a gap in human launch capability, it's *where* those humans are going.
I merely recognize that China accomplished a specific *first* in uncrewed space exploration in terms of a particular destination that adds some communication challenges, but as I already said above, I'm certainly not going to quibble about how comparatively "awesome" operating lifeless things that at best go about 0.1 mph at any given destination is. For explicit clarification, in comparison to the human exploration systems of the Apollo era, to me *all* uncrewed rovers are "little toys", to use your characterization, even if they weigh a ton and use a radioisotope power system. Note by the way that the Viking Mars landers already used those in the mid-Seventies as well, so that's not really a first either...
And we are completely limiting ourselves. The restrictions are internal. Given the political will (and cash of course) the US would have been to Mars and beyond by now. The political class gave up due to their shortsighted next election vote buying.
