It is best described as ballistic ballet. Last week, the most powerful rocket in the world pierced the stratosphere from a Florida launch pad. Not only did the payload survive launch, but the two side boosters later descended gracefully back to the launch area in perfect synchrony.

The spectacular debut of Falcon Heavy, built by the company SpaceX, potentially opens up deep space to reusable rockets, making exploration commercially viable. But it also cedes to the private sector mastery of an infinite territory once monopolised by governments. SpaceX is the costly plaything of Elon Musk, the billionaire cofounder of PayPal and Tesla (the payload was his own Tesla Roadster car, with a mannequin upfront, both now destined to glide about the solar system in perpetuity).

No federal space agency can currently do what SpaceX did. As Marx might have put it, private enterprise has seized the means of propulsion. We are in a new era when it comes to technopolitics, the intersection between technology and politics. While the original space race between the US and the Soviet Union showed off each country’s political ideals through technological prowess, that crossover between innovation and ideology has a different feel today.