YORK -- Chris Cassidy, the only astronaut who calls Maine home, said he got a much warmer reception at the four schools in his hometown Friday than he does at the schools his children attend in Houston.

"In Houston they ask, 'Oh, where is the fireman?' which is much more exciting than an astronaut, because everyone's parent works at NASA," he said.

At York's Village Elementary School, 315 kindergartners and first- and second-graders let out an audible gasp when Cassidy entered wearing a NASA jumpsuit.

He told them he remembered his own days in York schools, as the teachers and staff snapped away with their cameras.

"This is really exciting. He's a famous person," said the school nurse, Sherry Boyd.

Cassidy was on his first trip back to York since he spent more than two weeks aboard the International Space Station this summer. During that time, he made three spacewalks to do work on the space station. The ascent to orbit 200 miles above the Earth took only eight minutes.

On Friday, he talked to students at four schools in York, and to business groups, and spent the evening at the football game at York High School, where he was a quarterback on the football team before graduating in 1988.

Cassidy, 39, grew up in the Bath area before moving to York when he was in fifth grade.

Many parents of the Village Elementary School students grew up with Cassidy, and many of the second-graders who ate lunch before the assembly claimed connections to him.

"My dad went to college with him, and he came to our house when I was 2 years old," said Lauren Woodward, 7.

The gymnasium went silent as Cassidy described his experiences blasting into space, then hooking up to the space station. He said that as a boy in York, he never dreamed he would become an astronaut.

"Never in a million years did I imagine I would be standing in a blue spacesuit and talking to my hometown about space stuff," Cassidy said.

The children wanted to know whether space was fun.

"I had a smile on my face the whole mission," he said.

They wanted to know if he saw any extraterrestrials on his trip.

"No. No one in the history of the space program has seen one yet, but we keep looking," Cassidy said.

He regaled them with descriptions of life without gravity. Apparently, if you pour water from a squeeze bottle in space, it emerges in a perfect sphere that floats around the space station. It is possible to poke a straw into the middle of the water globe and drink it up.

Cassidy got a big laugh from his audience when told the children that when the astronauts use cordless screwdrivers in space, they have to anchor their feet, or else they'll rotate around and around.

He told them other interesting facts:

* The space station is about the size of an average house.

* The astronauts don't wear shoes in the space station, only socks.

* The shuttle travels five miles a second, so it would take about one second to reach the Cape Neddick lighthouse from the school.

After more than a half-hour of questions, Cassidy told the children that it was time for him to go. When he asked who would like to travel in space, nearly every child raised a hand.

Cassidy assured them they would have fun.