What if Superman landed in Berlin and not in Smallville, USA?
On the contrary, we'd have the "peace dividend" about 40 years earlier ... A lot of things would have been different and saving billions on defense just a small part of the benefit. Imagine Russia like it is today ... in the 1960s. ... we could do business. ... imagine most of the third world being liberated not to socialist tyranny but free market economics ... the world as a whole would be hugely richer.
And you dont need a space race to fuel technology.... the transistor radio was enough for Sony, the calculator enough for intel, the car radio enough for motorola, etc. The transistor progress was *faster* in 1990s than 1970s, so dont imagine the cold war helped that.