The Dragon is Coming The Dragon is Coming

From the BBC:

The first cargo resupply mission to the space station to be carried out by a commercial operator is likely to be on 30 April, the US space agency says.

The flight of the unmanned Dragon freighter is supposed to be just a demonstration, but its success would mark a new era in spaceflight....
Dragon has been developed under Nasa's Commercial Orbital Transportation Services, or COTS, programme, in which the agency has sought to seed fund cargo-carrying replacements for its recently retired shuttles.
SpaceX and another private company, the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corporation, have received hundreds of millions of dollars to help them develop new rocket and capsule systems.

The background of all of this can be found in this March 2011 article at BrahmandNews:

While Russia’s Progress spacecraft, launched by the Soyuz rocket, has remained a reliable unmanned resupply vehicle that continues to deliver tons of cargo to the space station every year and will continue to do so following the retirement of NASA’s space shuttles, cargo vessels of Japan and Europe too have joined in replenishing the ISS and bringing back waster material from there.

The H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV) or ‘Kounotori’ spacecraft of Japan has flown to the space station twice since its first mission in 2009. European Space Agency’s automated transfer vehicle (ATV-2) has also supported space supply missions since its first launch to the ISS in 2008.

With all three shuttles of NASA – Discovery, Endeavour and Atlantis, used to serve the dual purpose of ferrying astronauts as well as instruments to the scientific laboratory – set to retire later this year, the space agency has embarked on an ambitious programme to develop new commercial space vehicles for the delivery of crew and cargo to the ISS.

Under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services programme announced on January 18, 2006, NASA awarded two contracts, one to SpaceX and the other to Orbital Sciences Corporation, to design the new spacecrafts along with the launch rockets that will fly to the ISS.

The contracts include at least 12 missions for SpaceX and eight missions for Orbital Sciences between 2011 and 2015 carrying cargo to the ISS as well as disposal of ISS waste.

This ambitious programme gave birth to Dragon – the spacecraft designed by commercial firm SpaceX – to initially carry cargo to the space platform and perhaps astronauts in future.