NASA's long-overdue promise to send humans to cosmic destinations that aren't the moon will take a huge stride forward today when the agency's next-gen Orion spacecraft embarks on its first test flight. While most of public may be unfamiliar with the Orion program's extraordinary aims, today's test flight marks the first big step towards putting "one small step" in Martian soil.

But one step at a time.

The Orion spacecraft will lift off sans human crew from Cape Canaveral to embark on a 4.5-hour mission that will have it orbit the Earth twice before splashing down in the Pacific Ocean, approximately 600 miles off the coast of Baja, California. This test flight (the bureaucratically, if aptly named "Exploration Flight Test-1" or "EFT-1") will be a first real-world test for many of Orion's critical systems such as avionics, altitude control, parachutes, and heat shield.

The test flight is scheduled for a 7:05 a.m. (EST) lift-off (we've embedded NASA's feed above), however weather and/or mechanical issues may postpone the actual launch until sometime later in the three-hour launch window.

Today's launch comes courtesy of the Delta IV Heavy rocket, however future Orion test missions (possibly as early as 2018) are scheduled to hitch a ride on NASA's next-generation Space Launch System (SLS), which was specifically created to propel humans and heavy cargo all the way to Mars.

If all goes well with today's flight, the groundwork will be laid for the next big test, which is tentatively scheduled for 2018. At that point, Orion will embark on an unmanned, week-long mission to fly around the moon and back. That test will in turn set the stage for a mission in the early 2020s in which the spacecraft will rendezvous with a nearby asteroid, but this time with a human crew in tow.

There will be other TBA missions throughout the 2020s, which will test the spacecraft's capability and will—if all things go according to plan—set the stage for sending a human crew to Mars sometime in the early 2030s.

That is if all things go according to plan—aside from failures of engineering, recessions, political in-fighting, and other disruptions that have a tendency to muck up NASA's grandiose plans.

Three full presidential administrations before we get to Mars is perhaps not the most inspirational of timeframes, but that's what we've got. However, if you are in need of a little space hope, keep in mind that an increasingly competitive international space industry along with a burgeoning private space industry and non-profit initiatives such as the Google-funded Lunar XPrize could very well disrupt the timeline.

To boldy go where humans should have been decades ago.