Strap in and lift off just like an astronaut

As the countdown continued - six, five, four - I triple-checked the yellow five-point harness used to strap me to my bucket-like seat. I took off my baseball cap and wedged my BlackBerry securely inside the hip pocket of my jeans, lest it fall off my belt and conk someone. I tried to control my breathing. It wasn't easy.

Three. Two. One. Ignition. The engines roared, my seat rumbled. Liftoff.

A few months ago, when I received an invitation from my college buddy Leland Melvin, an astronaut and shuttle mission specialist, to a VIP viewing of his launch aboard Endeavour, I never thought I, too, would have the chance to literally blast off into space.

Well, sort of.

When technical problems postponed Endeavour's launch for the day, I stopped by the Kennedy Visitors Center and took a ride on its newest exhibit: the Shuttle Launch Experience, a 44,000-square-foot, $60 million interactive simulator ride. Designed in consultation with an amusement park design company and a former shuttle astronaut, the ride is hailed as the next-best thing to sitting next to a mission specialist on an actual space flight.

"It has been quite popular," said Andrea Farmer, press officer for the visitors center. The exhibit, she said, brings a new dimension to the center "because of the interactive nature."

That interaction begins well before participants take their seats in the full-scale mock-up of the shuttle's cargo bay. The visitors center itself seems designed to help people get a hands-on, front-row experience.

The complex includes an IMAX theater, an interactive exhibit on astronaut training, close-up tours of the launch site, and an open-air museum of rockets, from first-generation prototype vehicles to the gigantic Saturn V booster that propelled Apollo astronauts into space in the 1960s and 1970s.