Imean, the USSR wasn't even good socialism. They still used money for quite a large set of things, businesses were very much NOT worker owned in many places, people could be killed by the whims of authorities and a dictator... Yep, not even good socialism got to space first.

I wonder if those accomplishments were meant to happen if they hadn't had an ideological enemy in the 'capitalist west'.

The Soviet Unions industrial development was ironically funded by American capitalists during the 1920s through the 1940s. Without that massive influx of knowledge, technical expertise and capital, the Soviet Union would never have industrialized at the rate that it did. It might not even have succeeded. However, I am not an expert in Soviet history either.

Albert Khan was a American industrial architect who was responsible for designing and building American car, tractor and other factories for heavy industrial equipment in the United States. Starting in the 1920s, he traveled to the Soviet Union and designed and lead co instruction of ~500 massive state-run industrial plants using American equipment and machines. This is also similar to how Japan industrialized following the end of the Tokugawa shogunate during the Japanese civil War.

"When “the architect of Ford,” Albert Kahn, designed the River Rouge complex outside Detroit in 1917, Calder was one of the field engineers, but he had never worked on a project on the Soviet scale before. Everything from steel to skylights was coming from the U.S. by boat, special-built train, trucks, and, yes, camels. In barely a year’s time the factory would begin pumping out 50,000 tractors per year, operated by workers who lived across a strip of lawn in government apartment blocks that Calder was also building. Close to 400 U.S. workers were supervising the job, mostly from Detroit. Though their families shivered through the Russian winter in underheated homes, Calder and the rest of Kahn’s experts thrilled at the challenge. And there were 500 more factories to go."

"Though the collaboration has been all but forgotten, evidence suggests that more than 1,200 U.S.-based architects, engineers, designers, and foremen seeded the Soviet industrial revolution. In just three years, they built upwards of 500 factories, trained more than 3,000 Soviet staff, and brought lessons back home that have yet to be fully understood."

https://lsa.umich.edu/lsa/news-events/all-news/search-news/built-in-the-u-s-s-r---by-detroit-.html