5) Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle.
6) first failed Mars probe (and second, and third, and fourth, and fifth...)
It's possible to commemorate LANDING A MAN ON THE MOON, on its anniversary, without it necessarily having to be a political dick-waving contest you know.
But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development. The USSR wasn't even second to putting a man on the moon, no one has done it since Apollo.
> Best scale model imitation of the US space shuttle.
Scale model? It was about the same size, though internally very different (it's thought that they used the shape to save on doing some of their own re-entry validation).
It's really kind of ridiculous how similar it looked versus how different it was; the big thing on the Buran stack is a rocket, not a tank, for instance, and the boosters are kerosene.
> But since you brought it up, it does make you wonder how the US so completely outleaped the USSR to the moon, given how far ahead the USSR was in space development.
Well, first, the USSR wasn't that far ahead, perhaps a few years. But its moon programme was inadequately funded (and not funded at all until 1963 or so), not terribly focussed (there were designs based on Proton/Zond for flybys, tested unmanned shortly before Apollo 10, based on the N1, a giant kerosene rocket, on the UR-700, an ultimately undeveloped giant Proton, and so on), and subject to political interference, both from the government, and between the design bureaus.
It also wasn't pursued as the ultimate goal in the same way the US one was; at the time the USSR was also working on the Almaz (later Salyut) space stations, an automated sample return system, a greater focus on interplanetary probes (albeit without much success except for the Venus stuff) and other bits and pieces.
If they'd been willing to take the risk, they could probably have had the first manned flyby; there were a number of Zond missions, using a modified Soyuz, unmanned, in the couple of years before Apollo 10. It would have been _extremely_ risky, though; most of the Zond missions were at least partial failures.
Also the Russians made most of the advances on habitable space stations. Most important achievement for the long term exploration of space IMO. I think it's a shame that many of the achievements will be lost to history for political reasons but I guess it doesn't really matter who did what. The cold war in itself was probably a good thing in that regard.
1) first satellite - USSR;
2) first man in space - USSR;
3) first man-made object to impact Moon - USSR;
4) first man-made object to land Moon - USSR;
...