In a roomful of 12-year-olds, there was no way the question wasn't going to come up.

"In zero gravity, how do you use the bathroom?" asked a boy from the back of the auditorium.

Astronaut Edward M. "Mike" Fincke didn't flinch.

"I tell you what, I was not going to hold it for six months," Fincke said.

Fincke, 38, of Houston, Texas, formerly of Emsworth, then told the group of Bethel Park pupils how special toilets work on the International Space Station. Fincke knows, firsthand: He was aboard the International Space Station from April through October 2004.

One of only two Americans to visit space last year, Fincke visited Neil Armstrong Middle School last week, where teams of pupils are named Friendship and Endeavor for space missions. Fincke is the second visiting astronaut, after Armstrong himself, who attended the school's dedication.

Bethel Park fifth-grade teacher Kristen Rylander, a former classmate of Fincke's from Sewickley Academy, invited him to speak. The visit was free.

"I can't believe we're actually meeting an astronaut. That's so cool," said Nate Braman, 12, one of seven Bethel pupils who spoke with Fincke in September from a satellite downlink at the Carnegie Science Center.

Fincke finally got to meet the pupils Thursday after the first assembly and said he was excited to be face to face with them, because he couldn't see them during the satellite conversation.

His trip, called Expedition 9, was a joint effort with Russia. He spent four years before the trip studying with his crewmate, cosmonaut Gennady Padalka.

Fincke told them what it was like to go from zero mph to 17,500 mph in nine minutes, pulling three or four g's. (A g is a measure of the force of gravity on the body during acceleration. We pull 1 g just standing on Earth. Pulling 4 g's would make you feel four times as heavy as you do on Earth.)

The crew of two slept standing up (in zero gravity, it doesn't matter), they exercised on machines for 2¹/₂ hours each day to prevent muscle atrophy and they had to use special products to bathe because the station has no showers or baths. He had nothing cold to drink for six months because there was no refrigeration.

The crew had plenty of challenges. Their oxygen generator broke and required repair. American spacesuits malfunctioned. But Fincke said it was his dream come true.

He showed pictures of the landing and pointed to their tiny landing capsule.

"Look how big it is not," he said with a laugh.

Some of the questions the pupils asked were intellectual, such as, "How can we spend all this money going to space when some Americans are starving?"

"People in this country spend more on pizza than we do on the space program," Fincke said. He said the space budget is $16 billion a year, just a drop in the bucket of the country's $1 trillion budget. He noted how space travel contributes to daily life, leading us to learn how to miniaturize computers and advance technology.

Fincke's mom, Alma, escorted him to the event, and was beaming about her son's accomplishments. She remembers her son's April 2004 launch aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft vividly, as she watched from Mission Control in Star City, Russia.

Her grandson, Chandra, was with them for the launch and comprehended his father's feat as only a 4-year-old can: "To infinity and beyond!" he yelled, in the words of Buzz Lightyear, a toy astronaut from the movie "Toy Story."

Alma Fincke said her son, the oldest of nine children, always wanted to go to space, declaring at one point: "I want to be the first astronaut from Sewickley Academy."

He was.

Fincke said missing his family was the only downside to the trip. His parents still live in Emsworth and his wife, Renita, was pregnant and lived in Houston with their son.

His daughter, Tarali, was born while he was in space and he listened to the birth via phone.

During the assembly, he gave a nod to the space shuttle Columbia, which came apart over Texas and Louisiana in 2003, killing all seven astronauts on board.

"We had an accident with our space shuttle that was really, really, really bad," he said, telling the pupils he knew all the astronauts. "I miss them terribly. They would not want us to stop."

On a happier note, Fincke showed a DVD of his time in space, showing him smiling, horsing around with orange juice in zero gravity and working on experiments. He had four spacewalks and the crew completed more experiments than they had planned during their trip.

In an interview before the assembly, Fincke said he didn't know what his next mission would be. There are 100 active astronauts in the program and he's at the "end of the line" for trips right now, he said. But he told the Bethel kids he hopes to go to the moon someday. Mars, however, will probably happen after he is retired.

Of course, the Bethel Park kids wanted to know what happened to the bodily fluids after the storage tanks were full.

Fincke again calmly told them how they filled a cargo ship with trash and then "crashed it into the atmosphere," where it burned up in 10,000-degree heat.

Fincke's goal was to launch their ambition as he told them to work hard in school.

"It turns out, the first person to go to Mars is probably about your age'' right now, he said. "Whatever you want to do, whatever your dreams are, they can come true."

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