One hundred years ago Wednesday, one of the most significant milestones in the Human Adventure occurred. For millennia mankind wondered what it be like to fly like a bird, to soar above the clouds, and to reach toward the heavens. On December 17, 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright launched a new age where these things were possible, by achieving the first controlled and sustained flight in a powered heavier-than-air vehicle.

It lasted only 12 seconds and went only 120 feet, but it was enough to prove that man could fly. And at 10:35 a.m. on Dec. 17, 2003, exactly a century later to the very minute, this world-changing event will be recreated at the foot of Kill Devil Hill near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

John Travolta, an avid flyer himself, will host the First Flight Centennial Celebration at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, and as part of the commemoration — weather permitting — a replica of the 1903 Wright Flyer will glide down a 120-foot track, and tens of thousands of observers will watch as the machine attempts to lift into the air under its own power, and land a short distance away.

Following the re-enactment, retired brigadier general Chuck Yeager — the test pilot who broke the sound barrier in 1947 — will fly over the monument. And a special ceremony dedicating the Wright Flyer replica will be attended by Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong, the first human to step foot on another world. More information about the day's events and other centennial celebrations can be found at centennialofflight.gov, firstflightcentennial.org and countdowntokittyhawk.com. (C-SPAN has scheduled complete live coverage starting at 9:30 a.m. ET, both on TV and online.)

The Wright Brothers' achievement paved the way for a century when man no longer felt confined to Earth. Orville and Wilbur Wright led to Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Yeager, Yuri Gagarin (the first human in space) and Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. There is now serious talk that the Bush Administration may soon set NASA on track for a manned mission to Mars — and that announcement could come on Wednesday.

But just as significantly, the First Flight of 1903 and all the progress made in its wake has stimulated the collective imagination of the human species. Without the Wright Brothers, we probably wouldn't be thinking about going to Mars right now. Without those bicycle repairmen from Dayton, Ohio, the range of possibilities we can envision for our future would be smaller. Without Orville and Wilbur, there probably wouldn't be a Star Trek.

This connection is not lost on the current keepers of the Gene Roddenberry vision. The Wright Brothers' accomplishment is celebrated among other milestones in the history of human invention and exploration in the opening title sequence of Star Trek: Enterprise. In a related documentary feature, we look in detail at that montage of images, from the H.M.S. Enterprize to 20th-century aviation pioneers to Zefram Cochrane's Phoenix and ultimately the Enterprise NX-01.

(It should be clarified that the film clip you see of the Wright Flyer in the title sequence is NOT from the First Flight of 1903 — since only a still camera was present then. The first time the Wrights were filmed was in 1908 at a public demonstration in Le Mans, France, and that's where the clip came from. Visit this link to see the original footage. You will notice that for the Enterprise opening, the image of the plane taking off was flipped so that it flies left to right, to match the direction of movement of other clips in the sequence.)

In another hundred years, who knows how much further we can soar, how much deeper into the heavens we can reach. If the timeline of Star Trek were to hold true, 2103 will be the year we colonize Mars (according to "The 37's" — where we meet Amelia Earhart). Seems reasonable enough, doesn't it?