An unmanned version of an Orion capsule, built for NASA by Lockheed Martin, will become the first U.S. spaceship designed to fly astronauts beyond Earth's orbit for the first time since the 1960s era Apollo moon program.

The spaceship will liftoff aboard a Delta 4 Heavy rocket at 7:05 a.m. EST from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, NASA officials confirmed on Tuesday. The rocket was built and will be flown by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing. It will catapult a capsule around 3,600 miles from Earth so it can slam back into the atmosphere at a speed of 20,000 mph.

The Thursday test run will be followed in four years with the launch of a second Orion capsule, also unmanned, on the first flight of NASA's Space Launch System rocket. That flight will send the capsule around the moon, according to Reuters.

Orion's third flight is expected to include astronauts and is set for 2021.

"Thursday is a huge day for us," NASA Orion Program Manager Mark Geyer said in a press statement, according to Reuters. "Part of me hopes that everything is perfect but really on a flight test like this ... we want to discover things that are beyond our modeling capability and beyond our expertise so we learn (about) it and fix it."

NASA wants to use Orion and the SLS rocket to send crews to Mars. Astronauts haven't tried to reach beyond Earth's orbit since the 1969-1972 Apollo moon program.

One of the main goals of the 4-1/2-hour flight is to figure out how well Orion's heat shield can withstand temperatures of about 4,000 Fahrenheit (2,200 Celsius), according to NASA.

Another important test is to see what happens when the capsule's 11 parachutes deploy to slow its descent to 20 mph so it can splash down in the Pacific Ocean. NASA wants to reuse the capsule to test an emergency escape system needed in the event of an accident during liftoff.

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