With two back-to-back "near-perfect" Falcon 9 launches and satisfactory tests of the first Dragon capsule, SpaceX "asked NASA to combine objectives laid out for the remaining two COTS missions... and permit a berthing at the ISS during its next flight".

[5] This combined test mission was completed in May 2012, and achieved its objectives, opening the path to regular cargo deliveries by Dragon to the International Space Station (ISS) under the Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract.

[10] On 22 November 2010, SpaceX announced that it had received a license for spacecraft re-entry from the Federal Aviation Administration's Office of Commercial Space Transportation for the flight.

Included were a total of eight cubesats[16] including the first U.S. Army nanosatellite, Space and Missile Defense Command — Operational Nanosatellite Effect, or SMDC-ONE, for a 30-day mission,[17][18][19] and two 3U buses, the CubeSat Experiment (QbX), provided by the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office, also expected to remain in orbit for only 30 days.

[20] One of the weight ballasts inside the Dragon spacecraft was a metal barrel containing a wheel of French Le Brouère cheese.

[21] SpaceX's CEO did not reveal the identity of the cargo during the post-splashdown news conference, for fear of the joke overshadowing the company's accomplishments.

After the two planned orbits, the spacecraft was manually commanded to begin a deorbit burn, resulting in it splashing down in the Pacific Ocean at 19:02 UTC approximately 800 km (500 mi) west of Baja California after all three parachutes successfully deployed.

[3] SpaceX reported that all test objectives were completed, and the recovery craft arrived to retrieve the spacecraft within 20 minutes of splashdown.

This allowed SpaceX to work on a secondary mission objective of expanding the launch capability envelope by testing in-space engine reignition and ability of the vehicle to achieve a beyond-LEO (Low Earth Orbit).

Even though the nozzle of the Merlin Vacuum second-stage engine had been substantially trimmed—due to two cracks discovered only a few days before the scheduled launch—the second stage reached an altitude of 11,000 kilometers (6,800 mi).