Update: The launch date for the next SpaceX mission has officially been set for May 4th. The two-hour launch window opens at 1:22am ET.

Original story: SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket into space on April 8, and after the first stage delivered its payload, the vehicle descended back to Earth and landed on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.

Now the company hopes to repeat that sea-based feat under more dynamically challenging conditions. The launch earlier this month carried a Dragon spacecraft, destined for the International Space Station about 400km above the surface. With a launch tentatively set for May 3 during the early morning hours, SpaceX plans to deliver a Japanese broadcast satellite into orbit 22,000km above the planet's surface.

Further Reading SpaceX shares photos so we can relive the glory of landing a rocket on a boat

This means that the first stage will accelerate to a greater velocity, moving almost parallel to the surface and away from the launch site, before it releases the second stage and the primary payload. This trajectory will leave the vehicle with far less fuel to arrest this horizontal motion, and to control its descent to the barge waiting below.

Since the April 8 launch, SpaceX has returned the flown first stage, including its nine engines, to Port Canaveral for initial checkouts. Last week, SpaceX moved the rocket stage to its hangar at Kennedy Space Center for further tests. The company plans to fire its engines 10 times in a row on the ground. “If things look good it will be qualified for reuse,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said earlier this month. “We’re hoping to relaunch it on an orbital mission, let's say by June.”

The company needs to master the art of ocean-based landings because SpaceX estimates that only one-half of its launches will have enough fuel to fly back to the coast, where it has a ground-based landing zone, after fulfilling their primary missions. The May 3 launch attempt, with its challenging landing conditions, will go a long way toward determining how much SpaceX has learned so far.