Original | Odaily Planet Daily(@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma(@azuma_eth)
Humanity is finally embarking on its journey to Mars, and the central figure about to undertake this historic aerospace mission is someone from Tianjin.
On the morning of May 22, Beijing Time, SpaceX, which is gearing up for an IPO, dropped a major announcement — Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool and Mission Commander of Fram2, will board the Starship to execute the first batch of manned interplanetary Mars flight missions! The mission is planned as a two-year deep space flight, exiting the Earth-Moon system, passing by Mars (without landing), and finally returning to Earth.
Prior to this mission, Chun Wang, along with Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito, will participate in Starship's first commercial manned lunar flyby mission, expected to last about a week, with a flyby approximately 200 km from the lunar surface.
The Travel Maniac from Tianjin
On March 31, 2025, on the eve of the Fram2 mission launch, Chun Wang gave an interview to the aerospace professional media "Spaceflight Now," revealing many previously unknown stories from his upbringing.
Chun Wang was born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, and was raised by his grandparents. Until he left for university in 2000, he had hardly ever ventured beyond his hometown.
However, from a very young age, Chun Wang developed a strong interest in travel, always fantasizing about exploring the world: "In 1987, when I was 5 years old, my grandfather brought home a world map he found during a walk. That map instantly became my favorite toy and ignited my curiosity. What truly caught my eye was the vast blank area at the bottom of the map — the polar regions. From that moment on, I was deeply captivated by the mystery and excitement of these distant and unknown lands."
After university, Chun Wang first worked for a Norwegian software company in Beijing. It was then that his travel mileage truly began to skyrocket — to save money, he often slept on his French colleague's sofa or directly in the office, commuting back home about 120 kilometers away on weekends.
Chun Wang mentioned: "Despite having a full-time job, I traveled over 75,900 kilometers by train during weekends in the year 2007 alone. In total, I spent two full months that year inside train compartments, heading straight to the railway station after work on Fridays and not returning to the company until Monday morning."
Over the next four years, Chun Wang further expanded his travel footprint. By train, he visited every province in China.
In 2010, Chun Wang embarked on his first trip abroad — Nepal followed by India. That trip took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded what was then India's longest-running, non-stop train — the 16317 Himsagar Express, traveling all the way from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and continuing his journey in the country.
That journey ultimately cost him about $1,000, which was all the savings he had at the time.
"During those years, I was obsessed with infrastructure and transportation, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train journey down to the minute or even second and posted these records on online forums and message boards. Someone once gave me the nickname 'Thousand-HSR-Man,' because I was counting my high-speed rail rides at the time, aiming for the goal of 1,000 trips."
Chun Wang revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had taken 854 high-speed rail trips, but the number of his commercial airline flights was already extremely close to 1,000.
Wealth, Capability, and Resource Accumulation, Rooted in Cryptocurrency
Apart from travel, Chun Wang also displayed a keen interest in various emerging technologies.
At the age of 7, Chun Wang first heard about computers, but it wasn't until he graduated from elementary school at 13 that he owned his first computer, a 486SX running MS-DOS 5.0.
Chun Wang mentioned: "Besides playing games, I also used it to write many interesting programs. One of the earliest was a gravity simulator that visually demonstrated the motion of planets in the solar system... At school, I participated in various programming competitions, including the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the ACM-ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest). Due to my outstanding performance in these competitions, I was directly admitted to university without taking the National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao)."
In 2011, Chun Wang first heard about Bitcoin through the tech website Solidot, and on May 28 of that year, he bought his first Bitcoin at $8.7 each.
Simultaneously, as a tech enthusiast, Chun Wang began trying to assemble his own mining rigs to mine Bitcoin.
The initial story wasn't smooth sailing. Chun Wang first collaborated with Wu Gang, the later founder of Bixin, renting a few residential rooms and building a relatively crude mining farm with several dozen rigs. The startup capital was even borrowed from his father... Yet, despite this, Chun Wang managed to mine 7,700 Bitcoins over two years, spending 4,000 on electricity, trading 660 for an iPhone (which was later stolen at the St. Petersburg subway station), and liquidating the rest at $17 each in early 2023...
The turning point came in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (known in the cryptocurrency community as 'Fish Pool') in Wenzhou with Mao Shixing, nicknamed 'Shenyu.' The more introverted Chun Wang handled backend coding, while the more extroverted Shenyu managed operations. This was China's first Bitcoin mining pool, which later developed into one of the world's largest comprehensive mining pools.
In 2018, Chun Wang founded his second company, Stake.fish, in Thailand, a staking service provider specializing in PoS networks, offering comprehensive node staking services for networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polygon.
The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, coupled with the soaring price of cryptocurrencies, accumulated immense personal wealth for Chun Wang — in 2025, Chun Wang revealed that over the past decade or so, F2Pool had mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins.
A Space Dreamer
The rapid growth in wealth allowed Chun Wang to realize his childhood dream of traveling to the polar regions. In December 2021, Chun Wang successfully reached the South Pole; in July 2023, he reached the North Pole.
But after fulfilling these dreams, Chun Wang found that it still wasn't enough... His entire life had been a journey, continuously moving towards unknown horizons.
- 2006: He traveled west to the Kazakhstan border at 82° East longitude;
- 2011: He went to the southernmost tip of India, reaching 8° North latitude;
- 2012: He took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Europe, reaching St. Petersburg at 60° North, 30° East;
- 2013: He traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching 160° East longitude;
- 2016: He visited the United States for the first time;
- December 2021: He successfully reached the South Pole;
- July 2023: He successfully reached the North Pole...
But now, there are no further endpoints left on Earth. Where else could one go?
Chun Wang soon found the answer: "Since SpaceX began recovering Falcon 9 first-stage rockets, the commercial aerospace industry has been advancing at an incredible pace. I once again see something completely new and exciting unfolding, a feeling just like when I first heard about computers or discovered Bitcoin."
Chun Wang's choice was to fly into space. In 2023, Chun Wang proposed an extremely bold idea to SpaceX — he wished to privately and fully fund a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission to fly over a polar orbit passing both the Earth's North and South Poles.
Chun Wang's idea was that since humans entered space in 1961, because most rocket launches are concentrated near the equator or at mid-latitudes, the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous manned spacecraft (except for Apollo missions that passed by from a distance) have been unable to fly over the Earth's poles. In other words, for nearly 60 years of manned spaceflight history in low Earth orbit, the Earth's polar ice caps have been a visual and scientific blank. Therefore, Chun Wang hoped to take a never-before-taken polar retrograde orbit (Polar Orbit) at a 90-degree inclination, directly crossing and overlooking the Earth's poles.
Chun Wang named the mission "Fram2," in homage to the legendary polar research vessel "Fram," which carried Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic in history.
On April 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew Dragon "Resilience" lifted off on time from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Chun Wang, as the Mission Commander, led the all-civilian, fully non-American crew he personally selected (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian Arctic explorer) and officially embarked on their space journey.
In a 90-degree polar orbit with an apogee of 413 km and a perigee of 202 km, the spacecraft orbited the Earth every 93 minutes, taking only 46 minutes to fly from the North Pole to the South Pole. During the three-and-a-half-day flight mission, Chun Wang and the crew completed a significant amount of extremely hardcore scientific research and visual capture — including close observation of the rare, high-latitude atmospheric phenomenon STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement); capturing the first-ever space X-ray image in microgravity; and humanity's first attempt to grow fungal organisms in microgravity...
One noteworthy detail is that before the mission began, Chun Wang's friend Bao Er Ye (宝二爷) revealed online that Chun Wang had not made any backups of his Bitcoin private keys. He had stated that if anything happened to him during the mission, his Bitcoin holdings would be permanently destroyed.
Flying to Mars
Chun Wang's aerospace dreams did not end with the successful conclusion of Fram2 but continued to evolve further.
Returning to the story at the beginning, just before SpaceX tested the launch of its latest-generation Starship, SpaceX officially announced during a livestream two subsequent space plans for Chun Wang — a week-long manned lunar flyby mission, and the first-ever two-year-long manned interplanetary Mars flight mission in human history.
During SpaceX's live connection with Chun Wang, he was standing in the fierce winds on Bouvet Island at 54°26′ South, 3°24′ East. The island is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, near Antarctica, is an overseas territory of Norway (Norwegian Antarctic Territory), and lies outside the land claims frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.
On Chun Wang's personal X profile, he detailed his travel progress. As of the time of writing, the current status is: "60% of territories visited on 1 celestial body (150 / 249), to be continued..."
