One thing I've found facinating was, after the USSR launched the first satelite, and put the first man in space, the USA managed to redefine "win" as being "the moon".
Now in defense of the US, the soviets did put a satellite up first, but we were more than capable of doing so at the same time or even before. We sent up a satellite 2 months after the soviets. Contrast that with the moon landing. The soviets never sent a man to the moon even decades after we did. So in that light, I think the moon landing was far more impressive and representative of "victory" for a lack of a better word.
Perhaps we can say the soviets won the first space battle, but we won the space war? Without a doubt, we won the PR war as the moon landing and armstrong's "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" will be the iconic and defining moment of the space race for the rest of history.
Now that I know more about just how atrocious the us was internally to it's minorities and worse to several foreign countries during the cold war era, I sometimes wonder just how it was that the US won the cold war, and then I see something like 'death of stalin' and I come to understand that the other side was just as venal and absurdly incompetent, and just as incapable of living up to it's founding ideals
Well, Soviet was first to "touch" the moon (Luna 2, 1959),first to "soft land" on the moon (Luna 9 and 13, 1966), did a unmanned lunar soil sample return (Luna 16, 1970), moon rover (Luna 17, 1970).
Particularily combining first human safe return trip to space followed by landing a rover (shortly after Apollo) - it makes sense for Soviet to claim Mars as the "real" target for human exploration... After having tested "all parts" to a certain extent.
Isn't there like a subreddit or website called like r/ShitHNSays?
So long as you wanted to join the COMINTERN empire, and become a proletariat subjugated to the Party's bourgeoise.
The Soviet Space program (and US) explicitly wanted to place men on the Moon and Mars, and Korolev had a goal of doing that by 1968.
Hell, the only reason the Soviets didn't start their specific Moon program earlier was due to personal issues between competing departments as well as the Governments insistence that the space program be specialized toward weaponry rather than outright exploration.
In most wars for example who ever wins the first battle is important, but it's who wins the last battle that really matters.
I'm sure if you gave 20 billion more a year to NASA and said put a man in space, we could do so. It's just that quite frankly, we've out grown human beings in space, beyond simply doing so for bragging rights. You can do any kind of tests you want, with almost no limit to complexity, with robotics nowadays, and I don't believe we feel the need to "race" Russia and China to goals we've already accomplished. There's simply better ways to spend the money, research wise.
Putting a man on Mars would have required a monumental investment, which the USSR couldn't remotely afford.
And if they somehow had found a way to do that, they would have had to quit the arms race, which could very well have been considered a "win" for the US.
Ah the Cold War: when everyone was united in a common struggle against communism whether you spoke Italian, American or Japanese.