The USSR made some amazing contributions to technology, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it "gave birth to human travel in space" which to me impli

The USSR made some amazing contributions to technology, but it's a bit of an exaggeration to say that it "gave birth to human travel in space" which to me implies that it was a novel technology nobody else was working on and wouldn't have happened any time soon without them. The first manned US flight was a month after the Soviet one, and the US had successfully returned monkeys from space before that, so arguably they were ahead technologically but less willing to use a human test subject. It's more accurate to say that ICBM development in both the US and USSR had the unintended side-effect of giving birth to human space travel once the political benefits of using nuclear launch systems for human space travel were realized.