Excitement, or at least passing interest, has been generated in Belgium at the idea of the first Belgian in space – a certain Dirk Frimout, who went up as part of the Atlantis Space Shuttle team – and even IBM Belgium has decided to get into the act by establishing a multimedia presentation module about Frimout and the Atlas-1 mission at the Euro Space Centre near Rochefort in the south of the country, Mark John reports from Brussels. Atlas-1 was finally rocketed into space on Tuesday last week, after a hitch caused the launch to be delayed. IBM Belgium and its daughter company Concept & Multimedia SA have put together a programme to explain who Dirk Frimout is, what exactly is the Belgian contribution to Atlas-1, and where Frimout will be day-by-day are some of the questions that are answered with the text, graphics and sound melange that multimedia provides. Concept & Multimedia, which is a joint venture between IBM Belgium and the Brussels-based communications company Concept & Communication Business SA, designed the application, which will be running throughout the flight – which was scheduled to finish yesterday.
