I agree that the USSR won the space race if we're counting pure number of achievements, but it's a bad argument to make because they're no longer around to defend it. Similarly to how Apple is not the first to do jack shit that pushes technology, they're very good at marketing their features as higher quality and innovative to the point that people either 1.) believe Apple did everything first or 2.) Apple didn't do it first, but they did it better than the ones who did it first