Stocking the International Space Station has just become a three-way affair, with the European Space Agency stopping its periodic automated resupply missions to focus on future manned flights.

With two companies based in the United States now regularly launching payloads to the station, along with Russian and Japanese supplyships, the ESA will turn its attention toward developing a power and propulsion system for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Orion spacecraft, designed to carry four astronauts to destinations beyond the space station, including asteroids, the moon and Mars, according to a report by Reuters.

Europe's Automated Transfer Vehicle 5, lifted off two weeks ago with more than seven tons of cargo for the $100 billion orbiting laboratory, which is staffed by rotating crews of astronauts and cosmonauts from the United States, Russia, Europe, Japan and Canada.

Rob Navias, mission commentator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, called the docking a "bittersweet moment" for the European Space Agency, a key member of the 15-nation international partnership that built and now operates the ISS, said the Reuters piece.

The European cargo runs to the station started in 2008.

"It's a big event for us," European astronaut Alexander Gerst, one of six men currently aboard the station, said during an in-flight interview last week.

The fifth and last of the ATV cargo missions carried a European-built electromagnetic levitator, which will be used to suspend and heat metal samples in weightlessness, in an effort to refine industrial casting processes.

After the ATV-5 is unloaded, it will be filled back up with trash and obsolete station equipment.

Then, in late January, the cargo module will be detached, after which it's expected to fall into the planet's atmoshere and be incinerated.

The very last order given to the doomed cargo ship will be to record and transmit images of its own death -- in an effort to help engineers plan for the eventual disposal of the space station itself.

In the meantime, Russia and the other partners have commitments to run and support the ISS through 2020, the Reuters story said, while the U.S. plans to keep the station operating until at least 2024.