ESA Astronaut Frank De Winne

New ESA astronaut Frank De Winne is introduced to King Albert II of Belgium. ESA's Director General, Antonio Rodota, together with the Belgian Minister for Science Policy, Yvan Ylieff, announced Europe's newest astronaut at the opening of the Association of Space Explorers congress on 19 October 1998, a meeting of about 100 astronauts held that week in Brussels, Belgium. De Winne (37), a senior test pilot in the Belgian Air Force, joined the other 13 astronauts that make up the European corps. He will begin training around mid-1999 to qualify for future missions onboard the International Space Station. He is the second Belgian astronaut; the first, Dirk Frimout, flew on the Space Shuttle's Atlas-1 (STS-45) mission in 1992. With this nomination, ESA completed the first phase of its creation of a single European astronaut corps. Since June 1998, five astronauts from existing national astronaut programmes have been integrated into the ESA programme and several new astronauts were recruited. Other existing national astronauts will join the corps in 1999. The objective is to have a total of 16 astronauts by mid-2000 in order to meet the demand for European astronauts as the Space Station is built and research onboard gets underway. Until De Winne's addition, the European corps consists of 13 astronauts [Image Date: 19-10-98] [98.10.010-2/29]