My friend’s mother wrote a paper when she was in high school regarding the Cold War and why America would beat the USSR to space.
Two days before it was due, Sputnik went up. Whoops!
“It was a signal to the United States that now you have to be very cautious if you decide to attack us,” Khrushchev explains.
I could build a case that Sputnik was the reason why we won the could war and the USSR collapsed.