China pumping 19 billion dollars into their space program, where US is getting by with 3 billion.
I don't know where those figures came from, but they're very wrong.
US federal spending on space outstrips the rest of the world combined:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/10/25/the-u-s-still-spends-more-on-space-than-every-other-country-combined/US spending is north of $40 billion, while China is around $11 billion. This is all federal spending, both civil (NASA, NOAA, etc.) and military (DOD, NRO, etc.)
In the narrower vein of space exploration spending, NASA's total budget is about $19 billion per year (minus about a billion for aeronautics), while the equivalent spending in China is in the neighborhood of $2 billion per year.
http://www.businessinsider.com/how-big-is-chinas-space-program-2015-6Roughly speaking, the US spends about 9x more than China on space exploration.
China seems to be least have sense of direction what they want to do and prove the world.
Decision making on pretty much everything (not just space exploration) is easier in a country with only one political party and a hierarchical government, versus the multi-party system and divided branches of government in the US. No doubt, it is easier for China to set a direction and stick to it.
That said, the US program suffers more from gross inefficiencies and poor programmatic decisions than poor direction. When NASA's budget is more than every other civil space agency in the world combined, we should be making better progress than we are, regardless of whether the direction gets changed from time to time by the nation's leadership.
Even with a budget like NASA's, we can't spend tens of billions of dollars building a heavy lift launcher and capsule that largely duplicate privately funded work already in progress and that will cost a couple billion dollars per launch and expect to have much left over for actual exploration hardware (transit stages, habitats, landers, etc.). And we can't expect to mount human Mars missions requiring ten or so heavy lift launches when our heavy lift launcher only launches once every year or so.
NASA's budget is so big that we don't have to be particularly smart with it to make good progress. But we can't afford to spend so stupidly with it and still expect progress.
My 2 cents... YMMV.
