Star Trek: Enterprise was originally going to take place on Earth with a big lead-up to getting Enterprise bound for space. In the Star Trek: Enterprise season 1's Blu-ray bonus features, Brannon Braga said "it was a much more mud on the boots, gritty show set on Earth for the first large part of the season. So launching the ship was going to be a much bigger deal." [via Screenrant] Instead, the Enterprise is launched in the pilot Episode of the series, and though suffers from some growing pains, for the most part, it holds its own.
But that wasn't how the producers had pictured the starship at all. In fact, the Enterprise and its crew was supposed to get in over their head a lot. It was the first time in space with an untested starship, and there were supposed to be battles that severely damaged the Enterprise. The producers had in mind that Captain Archer [Scott Bakula] and his crew would return to Earth as battle-scarred as their ship. And the Enterprise would have been, at that time, barely able to make it back to Earth. It was the way the producers wanted to show the dangers of space.
But that wasn't how things went with the launch of the Enterprise. The crew took on some scary villains and bested them for the most part. The ship was no worse for wear when it finally made its way back home to Earth, and except for the ship's engineer, Trip Tucker, who died an absolutely ridiculous, needless death, all of the crew was in top form.
In reality, a first flight should have had more consequences even with the ship itself. There were no bumps along the way that would have happened with the first ship being launched into the galaxy. There was no way the engineers of the Enterprise could have accounted for every possible contingency for a vessel heading into the galaxy. So there should have been times when Captain Archer and his crew had a much rougher time with the performance of the ship both in and out of battle.
Perhaps this is what the untitled Star Trek Origins movie is intending to cover, and we'll see the ships that tried to make it into space before the Enterprise. It would be interesting to see how many attempts it took before the Enterprise was the successor into the great beyond.