For stargazers and aeronauts, there’s little doubt that SpaceX has skyrocketed into becoming the globe’s first independent space superpower: SpaceX launched more rockets than Russia did in 2021, and recently passed China in the number of astronauts it’s speeded into orbit.

SpaceX’s founder is a supernova in spacecraft design but almost as enigmatic as a black hole: Elon Musk aims to build a utopian hyper-tech empire - but on another planet. He wants to save the world - by making it a spacefaring civilisation that expands across the cosmos.

Musk is a visionary - building a constellation of internet-beaming Starlink satellites circling the Earth - yet he could be blindsided by attacks on this sky-network by Russian and Chinese defence planners: he’s already being targeted with threats launched by the twin powers.

Like another paragon of soft power, the Pope, Musk may be the ultimate global Good Samaritan: While Francis once airlifted war refugees held in a camp, via his papal plane, to freedom in Italy, Musk is extending a sky-dome of lifesaving Web link-ups over bomb-blasted Ukraine.

Invading Russian tanks, jets and hackers targeted Ukraine’s telecomm centres, Internet networks and satellite Web operators, aiming to bomb the country back into the digital Dark Ages - before the global Renaissance sparked by the Web - and trap it inside minefields of isolation.

Just hours after the blitzkrieg began, Kyiv’s Minister of Digital Transformation sent Musk a desperate appeal: "While you try to colonise Mars -- Russia try to occupy Ukraine! While your rockets successfully land from space -- Russian rockets attack Ukrainian civil people!”

“We ask you to provide Ukraine with Starlink stations,” Mykhailo Fedorov pleaded in the Twitter SOS. Within days, thousands of Musk’s Starlink satellite stations began pouring into the shellshocked country, along with his warning the dishes could be targeted by Russian snipers.

“@elonmusk many thx! Starlink keeps our cities connected and emergency services saving lives!” messaged Fedorov, a long-time ally of President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Starlink dishes have been rushed to hospitals, clinics, air-raid shelters, and universities across the country.

Zelensky uses his Starlink Station One to stage Zoom calls with Presidents Biden and Macron, and to link up with philanthropist Musk to sketch out a future space alliance. His Starlink-transmitted self-shot videos on life at ground zero have become a worldwide sensation.

But the satellite dishes have infuriated Moscow’s rulers and ruined their battle plans to cut all of Ukraine off from the world. The head of Russia’s space agency sent out a nationwide bulletin falsely accusing Musk of supplying military communications kits to Ukrainian “Nazis”.