A partnership of two private companies–one led by an engineer who led the development of the SpaceX rocket system–plans an aggressive program that would land an unmanned robotic probe onto the surface of Mars in 2024 or 2025, the New York Times reports.

Relativity Space plans to conduct the first test its new rocket during a launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida in the next few weeks in which it will test systems designed for the much larger Terran 1 rocket, which will be comparable to SpaceX’s Falcon 9.

Relativity is partnering with Impulse Space, a start-up founded by former SpaceX chief of engineering Thomas Mueller, who was the first employee hired by Elon Musk for SpaceX and who retired from that company in 2020.  Impulse was founded to design systems that can go from point-to-point in space.

“I feel like if it’s not something that’s challenging and that people think is difficult and you may not be able to do it, it’s not hard enough,” Mr. Mueller said. “We need to do stuff that people think can’t be done.”

The journey to Mars is complicated, as any space travel would be, but landing on Mars has proved to be the most difficult process of the trip.  Only the US and China have successfully landed a craft on the planet’s surface, with numerous attempts by the US crashing on the surface.

Attempts by other agencies–including the defunct Soviet Union, Russia, Japan, India and the European Space Agency–have had varying degrees of success, with some fixing satellites in orbit, but only the US and China have succeeded in landing a functioning probe on the surface.