An extra $20 bucks?
At the entrance you are asked to choose between the normal bus tour (included in your $26 ticket to the center), the "Up Close" tour, or the "Now and Then" tour (either of the last two are an extra $20 per person). If you have children with you, I definitely recommend the normal tour since small children especially will not appreciate the extra expense and could become bored on the longer tour.
How Up Close is the "Up-Close" tour?
The answer is several miles closer but still several miles away from what you might imagine/wish "up-close" to mean. The "Up-Close" tour begins by driving around the buildings where the astronauts are trained, the administration takes place (these have been in several hollywood movies), and where many of the support staff (power, water, fire, delivery & shipping) work. Especially cute are the bicycles outside the buildings that employees can use to ride on between the buildings (no locks necessary in this high security place). The bus does not stop any of these places but drives slowly as the guide explains to the 40-odd passengers all about the complex. Our guide Jeanie was VERY energetic and could answer all the factual questions that were put to her. She also pointed out at least three alligators in the ditch as we passed by.
The next part of the tour goes down the several mile long road to the main area for construction and maintenance of the shuttle and its rocket boosters. There is the massive Vehicle Assembly Building which is something like 582 ft tall (one floor). It was build to assemble the Saturn V rockets (for the Apollo missions) which area about twice as tall as the rocket booster for the shuttles today. The bus actually stops here and allows you to get out, but this is actually entirely gratitous since you don't see anything different than when you drove by on the bus.
One cool part of the "Up-Close" tour is driving down the road used by the crawler to take the shuttle to the launch pad. The road is made of special rocks and the crawler moves at a top speed of 1-2 miles an hour. You get to pass very closely to the crawler itself but this is as far as the normal tour gets. On the "Up-Close" tour we were driven by the gates surrounding one of the two launch pads. We were about 2-3 football fields away from the launch pad and the bus didn't stop but we got a pretty good view.
From there they take you to a view point which is 1 mile from each of the two launch pads where you can get out and take pictures. The tour doesn't seem very up-close here because unless you have a massive zoom lense, the launch pad is going to be pretty small. You are given 10+ minutes here to listen to the guide and appreciate how close the launch pads (and you) are to the ocean.
All tours go to a special building from here where you watch a short film on tv screens about the space race before going into a model of the old launch command center where you can re-live an apollo launch complete with vibrating room/windows to simulate the massive power of the shuttle taking off. Entertaining but all the standing gets tiring after laziness induced by sitting on the bus.
Although I was not sorry I went on the "up-close" tour, since I would not have known what it was like otherwise, it did not get as close as I had hoped. The orbiter (real term for the shuttles) Endeavor was scheduled to launch the week I visited and so it, with its rocket boosters, was out one of the launch pads. We never got closer than a mile to it. If you are a space buff, I recommend paying the extra money, but if this is your first encounter with the space program I wouldn't bother. The standard tour at Johnson Space Center in Houston, where Mission Control is located, takes you right into the buildings where they are making high tech planes and you get to observe the real mission control from behind a glass wall. I was much more impressed with the Houston site, other than the potential at Cape Canerval to actually witness the shuttle launch.