In what NASA Administrator Charles Bolden described as the “beginning of the Mars era,” the agency made a historic launch today. NBC News reports, “After a sunrise launch, NASA’s Orion deep-space capsule hit a historic peak during its first test flight on Friday. … NASA and its commercial partners are designing Orion to take astronauts to a near-Earth asteroid in the 2020s, and to Mars and its moons in the 2030s. For that reason, NASA portrays Friday’s 4.5-hour test flight as a first step toward deep-space exploration. The mission is known as Exploration Flight Test 1, or EFT-1.” It’s good to see NASA making another leap into space. More…