I like the German version much better.
Similarly Eric's page discussing ongoing life science experiments involving primates and frogs ignores the heck out of Gemini. Eric argues that Biosatellite 3 was launched to test the duration of a complex organism in space prior to Apollo. To him it's "suspicious" that the poor monkey's health deteriorated necessitating an early end to the mission.
And then a subsequent mission involving frogs didn't even have a provision for recovering the specimens alive, which is supposed to "reveal" NASA's skepticism of their ability to keep things alive in space. (Nevermind that it was never the plan to recover the frogs. They were surgically instrumented and demotorized, making their hypothetical post-flight lives as frogs fairly pointless. That's cruel, perhaps, but it makes it a lot cheaper to run the experiment.)
In light of these "secret" missions, Eric tries to point out that even though NASA was collecting data and making decisions that life could not be sustained in space, they launched Apollo 11 "anyway".
What the heck was Gemini for then?
"Did NASA have two separate space programs?" asks Eric. The answer is no -- they had many concurrent space programs. Apollo was the manned landing on the moon project. There were other projects to investigate life sciences, space sciences, and a whole host of other research projects that had nothing to do with Apollo. Eric tries to tie these other projects to Apollo when they don't fit, and he completely ignores the massive project whose sole, stated purpose was to prepare for Apollo.
And the only specific hazard Eric identifies in space is radiation. Neither the monkey nor the frogs suffered any radiation effects. The monkey died from complications of dehydration and the frogs were half-dead when they were loaded on the rocket.
Eric?
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