Space transport company SpaceX 's unmanned Dragon capsule splashed into the Pacific Ocean on Tuesday afternoon, wrapping up its second contracted mission of delivering commercial payload to the International Space Station.

"Splashdown! Dragon splashed down safely in the Pacific. Welcome home!" the California-based private company announced through its Twitter account after the capsule splashed into water at 09:35 a.m. PDT (1835 GMT), hundreds of miles off the west coast of Baja California.

The spacecraft launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket on March 1 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It reached the station two days later with about 1,200 pounds of supplies for the space station's six-man crew, including frozen mouse stem cells, 640 seeds of mouse-ear cress, a small flowering weed used in research, and tasty treats for the station crew picked from the orchard of a SpaceX employee's father. Astronauts swapped the cargo with 2,600 pounds of gear to be returned to Earth.

Dragon's return date, originally scheduled for March 25, was postponed due to inclement weather developing near its targeted splashdown site in the Pacific Ocean.

This is the second of 12 contracted flights by SpaceX to resupply the space station and marks the third trip by a Dragon to the station, following a successful demonstration mission in May and the first resupply mission in October.

The next SpaceX cargo run is scheduled for September. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is working on a second commercial delivery system that's due for its first test launch next month. But only the Dragon is capable of bringing significant amounts of cargo back to Earth, a critical capability that was lost when NASA's space shuttle fleet was retired in 2011. The Russian Soyuz spacecraft that ferry crews to and from the space station can only carry a few hundred pounds of small items back to Earth. All other station vehicles -- unmanned Russian Progress supply ships and European and Japanese cargo craft -- burn up during re-entry.

Before Dragon's liftoff, flights to the space station have always been a government-only affair. Until their retirement, U.S. space shuttles carried most of the gear and many of the astronauts to the orbiting outpost. Since then, American astronauts have had to rely on Russian capsules for rides.

NASA is looking to the private sector, in this post-shuttle era, to get American astronauts launching again from U.S. soil. It will be at least four to five years before SpaceX or any other private operator is capable of flying astronauts.