SpaceX is poised to launch another critical test flight of its massive Starship rocket on Sunday, a mission that comes with heightened stakes following a series of explosive setbacks this year.

Starship is set to take off from SpaceX’s South Texas launch facility, called Starbase, during a window that opens at 6:30 p.m. local time. The mission will be the rocket’s 10th major test flight.

SpaceX has been periodically launching Starship on a series of test missions designed to ready the vehicle for lofting satellites – and eventually people – to Earth’s orbit and beyond. Yet the first two flights this year blew up within minutes, a third failed to deploy dummy satellites and spun out of control, and the most recent rocket exploded on a test stand in June during fueling.

Those failures have led to increasing questions about whether Starship will be able to fulfill the aims of Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk. SpaceX has opted to temporarily reassign roughly 20% of its Falcon engineering team to Starship to help with testing and reliability, Bloomberg previously reported.

The company says it uses failures as learning opportunities that it can apply to future launches. But after a lackluster start to the year, this next mission will face extra pressure to perform better than the others.

“A successful test would almost kind of erase the challenges of the last year,” said Carissa Christensen, founder and CEO of BryceTech, an analytics and consulting firm. “An unsuccessful one is just going to add to that scrutiny and that sense of what’s going on.”

Advertised as the most powerful rocket ever built, Starship is meant to fulfill Musk’s dream of starting a human settlement on Mars. The vehicle is designed to be fully reusable and is supposed to eventually replace SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, becoming the company’s sole vehicle for launching satellites and humans to space. The eventual goal is to land and take off from the moon and Mars.

Musk hinted on his social media site X that he would provide a technical update about the Starship program on Sunday around the launch.

SpaceX is still years away from unlocking Starship’s full power. For now, the company is trying to demonstrate that the rocket can achieve orbit, deploy satellites and return to Earth fully intact. SpaceX has so far shown on two flights that it can catch the Super Heavy booster, the massive lower portion of the rocket that lifts Starship into space. On the upcoming flight, SpaceX has said the booster won’t return to the launch site for another catch attempt, but will instead aim to have a controlled landing in the Gulf of Mexico while also demonstrating some new maneuvers on the way down.

On this mission, SpaceX will again aim to perform some technology demonstrations that it hasn’t been able to achieve on previous tests flights this year. Notably, Starship will attempt to deploy eight dummy satellites that are similar in size and weight to the future Starlink internet satellites the company hopes to launch. On its ninth test flight, Starship’s payload bay door failed to open, trapping the dummy satellites inside the vehicle.

SpaceX is also once again performing a number of experiments with Starship’s heat shield tiles, which cover the side of the vehicle and are meant to keep the spacecraft from overheating when it reenters the atmosphere. The company hasn’t been able to retrieve any tiles to analyze from its test flights this year as all of the Starships that have launched have been lost before returning to Earth.

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