Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

Around an hour’s drive from downtown Orlando, The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex offers guests the chance to vicariously live the star-spangled life of an astronaut. Through high-tech interactive exhibits and special effects—including augmented reality and Star Wars-style holograms—you’ll get a very real sense of what life in space is like. Highlights include the Space Shuttle Atlantis Exhibit (the famous craft itself hangs from the ceiling in all its mid-flight glory), the United States Astronaut Hall of Fame(fascinating and humbling in equal measures) and the Shuttle Launch Experience,which does pretty much everything you’d expect, save leaving the Earth.