Subjects: Technology

In 1950, during the Korean War, Soviet and U.S. jet fighters clashed in the fastest dogfights ever seen. The most advanced planes of their day, the MiG-15 dueled with the F-86 Sabre over MiG Alley, a notorious strip of airspace along the Korean-Chinese border. With rare archival footage and interviews with veteran aces, NOVA puts viewers in the cockpit to experience the danger and drama of MiG Alley, revealing how the Sabre and the MiG acquired their reputations as fearsome fighting machines.
Missing in MiG Alley is also a gripping human story. Over 30 U.S. and British pilots disappeared during combats over MiG Alley, leaving their family members today with painful unanswered questions. NOVA traces the efforts of U.S. government investigators, forensic experts, and family members to determine the missing pilots’ fate, drawing on eyewitness interviews and newly opened Soviet archives. In a few cases, closure has finally come to families more than a half-century after the ferocious dogfights that claimed their loved ones.

The world changed fifty years ago, on October 4, 1957, when the U.S. public heard the shocking news that the Soviet Union had successfully launched the first satellite, Sputnik The astonishing behind-the-scenes story of the politics and personalities that collided over the earliest efforts to get America into space, long before the founding of NASA. Anticommunist witch-hunts drove some of the nations most talented rocketry pioneers out of the country even as we welcomed Wernher von Braun and his former Nazi colleagues. With help from Walt Disney, von Braunís vision of future space travel swiftly captivated U.S. TV watchers. But even as he became the first media star of the Space Age, von Braunís attempts to build space probes were hobbled by inter-service rivalries. In “Secrets of the Sputnik Race” NOVA details the previously untold story of the technological and political missteps that made the U.S. lose out to the Soviets bleeping electronic basketball.