As announced in a previous post, at the end of September, it was believed that Belgian astronaut Frank De Winne will go 6 months to space.

Today it’s made official, the European Space Agency (ESA) has assigned crews for the next flight opportunities.
And Belgian Frank De Winne was assigned to join mission 19 and stay in the International Space Station for 6 months.

The trip to the ISS itself will go through somewhere in May 2009.
He will make the voyage to the ISS in a Russian Soyuz spacecraft together with Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Robert Thirsk.
After 2002, it’s Frank’s second time in space, but now he’ll stay a bit longer than 1 week in the ISS.