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Students at Riley Avenue Elementary School in Calverton had a question-and-answer session with NASA astronaut Timothy J. (T.J.) Creamer aboard the International Space Station Tuesday as the spacecraft flew across the North American continent 220 miles above the earth.

The radio contact was facilitated by the Peconic Amateur Radio Club, whose youngest member, Jessie Greenberg, is a fourth-grader at Riley Avenue School. In an interchange that lasted about nine minutes — until radio contact was lost as the craft flew out of range over the Atlantic Ocean — the students asked Creamer questions about life aboard the space station.

Creamer, 50, of Upper Marlboro, Maryland, is a NASA flight engineer and science officer. He has been aboard the space station since Dec. 22, one of a three-man international crew that launched aboard  Soyuz-TMA-17 from Kazakhstan Dec. 20 for a 6-month tour of duty. Selected for the NASA astronaut program in 1998, Creamer, a U.S. Army colonel is on his first space mission. When asked by Riley students "what is the coolest experiment you've ever done," he replied, "living in space." He drew laughter from the crowd of assembled students, teachers and parents at Riley when, in response to a question about getting dressed in space, he said, "you can put your pants on both legs at once instead of one leg at a time."  Among the things he said the crew does "for fun" aboard the ISS is "talk to you guys."

Creamer recently sent the first-ever tweet from space. His Twitter handle is Astro_TJ.

For more on Creamer's life aboard the space station, read an interview with Creamer by NY Times technology blogger Nick Bolton, published Feb. 1.

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