Blasting Off for Florida’s Kennedy Space Center : It’s one of the few educational, historic experiences that children rate on a par with Disney World.

First there was a big cloud of white smoke in the sky. Then an ear-splitting boom. Flames shot across the sky.

“I see it!” 8-year-old Matt exclaimed, though 6-year-old Reggie had trouble figuring out exactly where to look. We were seven miles away, after all.

We cheered wildly, along with thousands of other people who lined the beach on Merritt Island, Fla., just after 8 a.m. on that breezy morning last month. We heard Mission Control confirm it over strategically placed loudspeakers: The Space Shuttle Atlantis, with her seven-member crew, had successfully blasted into space.

It was one of those moments when it felt good to be an American. Perhaps even more important, it was worth the sleep it had cost us. Like everyone there that morning, we had gotten up before dawn, as Space Center officials had instructed, in order to make it through traffic jamming the road to the Kennedy Space Center launch site.

But even the traffic snarl wasn’t boring. The Kennedy Space Center sits in a National Wildlife Refuge where there are more endangered species than at any other refuge in the continental United States. Here, the kids could watch for alligators, armadillos and eagles, among other things, while we fretted over whether we’d make it to the launch site in time. (We did, but only because the shuttle had been delayed a few minutes. Even if you get onto the grounds in plenty of time, don’t be fooled. The traffic will be bumper to bumper down to the launch site. It took us more than an hour to go the last few miles, once we were on the grounds.)

“Awesome,” was the way Matt described it. Of course he and his sister couldn’t agree on the best part: She voted for the flame, he liked the roar.

It didn’t matter that they couldn’t agree. They rarely do on anything. What counted to me was that here was an educational, historic experience that they rated on a par with Disney World. That certainly was a first. They’d even given up a morning at the Magic Kingdom in order to be there. And they were actually happy about it.

Other families and kids we met clearly felt the same way. Some had specifically planned trips in hopes of seeing the shuttle launch. (This is an iffy proposition at best, Space Center officials warn, because so many launch dates are changed and missions scrubbed at the last minute.) Others, like us, had just happened to be in the area, about an hour east of Orlando, at the right time.

“Hopefully, exposing your kids to events like these will spark creativity in them,” said Sherry Smith, whose family had traveled from Houston to Florida specifically to watch the shuttle launch.

We, of course, weren’t nearly so deliberate. We happened to be touring the Kennedy Space Center a couple of days earlier, on our way to Disney World, when we realized we would be just 50 miles away in Orlando when the Atlantis was scheduled to blast off. We couldn’t resist returning--even if it meant getting up at 3 a.m. and later touring Epcot Center completely bleary-eyed.

But a few days earlier, before attempting a visit, we had purchased tour passes from SpacePort USA for the four of us (for $22). You can’t just arrive at the Kennedy Space Center the morning of the launch. You won’t be permitted on the grounds. You must have appropriate car passes just to drive in. And tours are not offered for every launch. If a tour is being offered, tickets and car passes must be picked up at least the day before. (To find out more, call 407-452-2121 or write Spaceport USA, TWRS, Kennedy Space Center, Fla. 32899.) Free car passes also are available from NASA (write NASA PA PASS, Kennedy Space Center, Fla. 32899).

And remember: NASA only gives out 2,500 passes for each launch, and only for the next one scheduled (there probably will a launch every month except November this year). That means, a NASA spokesman explained, that you can’t write in June for a pass for the December launch. “Try six to eight weeks ahead,” she suggested.

Even if you’ve got a pass, there’s no guarantee you’ll see a launch. For one thing, the mission could get scrubbed. The Atlantis, for example, was postponed for a day because of weather and a fuel-tank problem. But don’t worry. Even if you miss a launch, you and your kids will still have a great time. The experience is a bargain, too. A family of four can visit for less than $25, not counting souvenirs and food. That’s not much more than the cost of a single child’s ticket to Disney World and you can give yourself a pat on the back for doing something “educational” while on vacation.

And it won’t be boring. Our kids didn’t think so, at least. For starters, an astronaut--at least someone dressed in a spacesuit--greeted the kids and posed for pictures, just like Mickey and Minnie do at Disney World. We took a turn through the Rocket Garden, sizing up eight huge rockets representing various stages of U.S space exploration.

Then we boarded the shuttle Ambassador. Well, not exactly a real shuttle but a full-size replica, down to the switches in the cockpit. Matt and Reggie were intrigued to discover that in space, astronauts use a bathroom that is a complex vacuum system attached to a high-tech toilet.

On a more serious note, nearby is the nation’s newest national memorial, the year-old 42.5-foot-high, 50-foot-wide Astronauts Memorial, dedicated to the 15 U.S. astronauts who have been killed on duty.

The two-hour bus tour (which is, for the most part, umbrella-stroller accessible) showed us everything from the huge building where the shuttle is assembled to a Saturn V Rocket (36 stories tall). This was the last of the big moon rockets, used as a backup for Apollo Mission 17.

Had the shuttle not been so close to launching, we could have seen the pad close up, too. As it was, we got close enough to take pictures of both shuttle launch pads from a distance. The new shuttle, Endeavor, which replaces the Challenger, was being prepared for flight in May or June.

But more than the two-hour tour (which is a bit too long for younger children), a 37-minute movie on a giant-screen TV really brought the space program into focus for us. We felt as if we were in orbit with a shuttle crew, eating with them as they perched on the ceiling, floating through the cabin doing experiments, walking in space and sleeping strapped to a sleeping bag attached to a padded board.

There are other films, too, including one about a boy who visits Earth from Mars, but our kids opted to see “space stuff,” as they put it, and they got their fill: from a moon rock to spacesuits to the tiny orbiters to a full-scale model of the lunar module that the astronauts used to land on the moon. They even sat in a replica of a lunar rover and tried to imagine what it must have felt like to be riding a buggy on the moon.

Of course, there were limits to the appeal of even this high-tech gadgetry on grade schoolers. At times, Matt and Reggie were more interested in collecting pieces of quartz from the parking lot than in listening to an explanation of how two giant “crawlers,” half the size of a football field, move shuttles to their launch pads.

All things considered, it seemed to take them a while to get back to Earth after we left, clutching toy shuttles and plastic Saturn moon rockets.