LYNN – Nearly 800 students from the Robert L. Ford K-8 packed the school’s gymnasium Thursday morning, as their much-anticipated talk with astronauts aboard the International Space Station finally became a reality.After five months of problems, delays and cancellations, the unique program experienced a smooth launch at 9:45 a.m. when astronauts Peggy Whitson and Dan Tani along with Russian Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko linked up with the students via satellite television feed from their temporary home inside the space station.In their 20-minute question and answer session with the students, the space explorers satisfied their curiosity not only by answering questions, but also through hands-on demonstrations. As all three astronauts took turns speaking to the students, Tani demonstrated the challenges of living in zero gravity, letting his body float and fly through the module as he ate candy and zipped himself into a wall-mounted sleeping bag.”In the future, we are going to want to get off Earth and live in other places. We are doing research to help understand how people can continue to act and grow in space,” Tani explained, chasing down a candy-coated peanut. “We get hungry up here just like you do down on Earth. But here it is more of a challenge to eat things because sometimes you have to chase the food around the lab.”The pre-screened questions addressed everything from how the astronauts keep clean in space to what the view looked like as the space station hovered over the Pacific Ocean, with a distant view of Hawaii.One student, eighth grader Michael Zlatin, even posed a question to Malenchenko in both English and his native Russian adding an international flavor to the event.While questions were posed to each of the three astronauts, much of the attention was directed toward Whitson, who recently set a record for longest time spent by a woman floating in zero gravity- nearly 32 hours.The mission’s First Commander said she was inspired to become an astronaut when she watched Neil Armstrong take the first steps on the moon when she was a child, and knew she would fulfill her dream when Dr. Sally Ride became the first American woman in outer space in 1983, the same year Whitson graduated high school.”I feel very lucky to be here, I don’t know if I particularly deserve to be here, but I am very glad for this opportunity,” she said. “I hope that some of the young ladies in the audience will have the same opportunity I had in the future.”While just traveling to space is the experience of a lifetime, Whitson said nothing compares to actually leaving the shuttle and floating through zero gravity in open space.”I think I was the opposite of scared (the first time she walked in space), I was so excited. You feel just like a bird, flying high over the Earth,” she said. “Your suit is a one-person spacecraft built especially for your body. You feel just like a bird.”Whitson and Tani offered interesting insight into what astronauts do with their downtime in space, including how they stay in shape with a treadmill, cardio bike and a resistance strength machine.Tani said the sun rises and sets every 90 minutes in the area that the space station is located, but sleeping patterns are not altered because there are very few windows in the area where they are working and living.The trio has been living and working on the space station’s U.S. Harmony Laboratory for months as part of NASA’s Expedition 16 mission, researching new equipment and repairing small damage to the outside of the structure created by space junk. On Thursday, NASA delayed the flight of space shuttle Atlantis until late January or, more likely, February to replace a suspect connector in the fuel tank.During their mission, the crew also added two additional 217-foot solar rays and a new module to the rear of the structure.”The International Space Station is an important step to learn about going further to the moon and Mars,” said Whitson. “We are learning about how we ca