An historic space mission took off from Florida at the weekend.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration used a private company, SpaceX, for the first time to transport astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station in a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday.

Nasa uses a tracking station based at Cooper’s Island in St David’s to monitor launches.

Lift-off from the Kennedy Space Centre was at 4.22pm Bermuda time.

SpaceX was founded by technology billionaire Elon Musk, also the chief executive of the Tesla electric car firm, in 2002.

A Nasa blog said later that the Crew Dragon spacecraft had reached orbit and it docked with the space station yesterday.

The launch was rescheduled last Wednesday because of bad weather.