Even as Elon Musk coronates himself with fantastical royal titles that seem snatched from a video game - like the “Imperator of Mars” bio he posted on his throne at Twitter - he is almost worshipped as a world-changing revolutionary a continent away, across post-imperial France.

Techno-elites in the French National Assembly and Elysée Palace are hailing SpaceX for upending the space sector’s Ancien Régime, and in the process remaking the heavens and the Earth. SpaceX is a new Promethean torchbearer, they say, for the future of French spacecraft design.

Deputies to the Assembly have been tracking rapid-fire changes in the pattern of launches - of satellites and astronauts - by the great space powers. In their new space chronicles, covering astro-tech advances around the world, they chart SpaceX’s influence virtually everywhere.

The dream of colonising Mars? SpaceX is now at the forefront of the rocket race to the dreamlike dunes of Mars, the lawmakers say. Russia’s decline as a space player? Unable to compete with SpaceX fares to loft spacefarers to the ISS, Roscosmos is now sinking as “a losing power.”

Russia’s falling aerospace fortunes are likewise due to its diversion of rubles out of human spaceflight and into armed missiles, the French deputies say. This is propelling Moscow’s slow-motion crash and isolation on the global stage.

Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, European space leaders have halted joint missions with Moscow to map the Moon and the Martian deserts. Co-exploration of the cosmos has become “politically impossible,” they say, as battlefields cratered by rockets desecrate Europe.

Yet even as Moscow plotted its military campaigns to crush and take over part of democratic Europe, Beijing strengthened its aerospace axis with Moscow and their joint plans to carve out a colony across the ancient craters of the Moon’s South Pole.

The European Space Agency is now rethinking whether to send EU astronauts to Beijing’s new space station, and the French deputies note that strategic rocket commanders in “the People's Liberation Army … control launch centres [and] satellite command centres” across China.

With three state-of-the-art launch systems - the French-designed Ariane 6 and Ariane 5 rockets and the lighter Italian Vega-C craft - along with the vast tropical French Guiana Space Center, Europe remains a great space power, but faces an array of challenges.

Vega-C’s upper stage depends on a sophisticated engine produced in the Ukrainian “Rocket City” of Dnipro, which has been blasted by missiles fired from Russia. ESA’s leaders say they are in constant contact with the besieged rocket outpost.