NASA's first spaceship that will leave Earth for deep space exploration has powered up for the first time ever. The Orion marks a "major milestone in the final year of preparations for flight," according to NASA.

Orion's avionics system was installed on the crew module and powered up for a series of systems tests at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida last week. Preliminary data indicate Orion's vehicle management computer, as well as its innovative power and data distribution system—which use state-of-the-art networking capabilities—performed as expected.

Orion will launch in the fall of 2014, and the test mission (EFT 1) will take the ship "15 times farther than the International Space Station" for two orbits, returning to Earth at 20,000 miles per hour. This mission won't have any crew.

In the words of NASA's deputy associate administrator for exploration systems development Dan Dumbacher:

Orion will take humans farther than we've ever been before, and in just about a year we're going to send the Orion test vehicle into space. The work we're doing now, the momentum we're building, is going to carry us on our first trip to an asteroid and eventually to Mars. No other vehicle currently being built can do that, but Orion will, and EFT-1 is the first step.

Find out more about Orion and EFT-1 here.

[NASA]