Author｜Azuma, Odaily Planet Daily
Humanity is finally about to embark on its journey to Mars, and the protagonist of this space mission, which is destined to be recorded in human history, is a man from Tianjin.
On the morning of May 22nd, Beijing time, SpaceX, which is about to have its IPO, dropped a bombshell announcement – Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool and commander of the Fram2 mission, will travel aboard Starship to carry out the first manned interplanetary Mars mission! The mission is planned to be a two-year deep space flight, flying out of the Earth-Moon system, passing by Mars (without landing), and finally returning to Earth.
Prior to this mission, Wang Chun will also participate in Starship's first commercial manned lunar flyby mission with Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito. The mission is expected to last for a week and flyby at an altitude of about 200 kilometers above the lunar surface.
A travel fanatic from Tianjin
On March 31, 2025, on the eve of the launch of the Farm2 mission, Wang Chun gave an exclusive interview to the aerospace media outlet Spaceflight Now, in which he revealed many previously unknown stories about his growth.
Wang Chun was born in Tianjin, China in 1982 and was raised by his grandparents. He had almost never left his hometown until he went to university in 2000.
But from a very young age, Wang Chun developed a strong interest in travel, always dreaming of traveling around the world: "In 1987, when I was five years old, my grandfather brought back a world map he had found while taking a walk. That map instantly became my favorite toy and ignited my curiosity. What truly attracted my attention was the huge 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 remote and unknown places. "
After leaving university, Wang Chun first went to work for a Norwegian software company in Beijing. Since then, his travel mileage has really skyrocketed. To save money, he often sleeps on his French colleagues' sofas or directly in the office, and then commutes back to his home, which is about 120 kilometers away, on weekends.
Wang Chun mentioned: "Although I had a full-time job, in 2007 alone, I traveled 75,900 kilometers by train on weekends. In total, I spent two months of 2007 in train carriages. Every Friday after work, I would go straight to the train station and not return to the company until Monday morning."
Over the next four years, Wang Chun further expanded his travels, traveling by train to every province in China.
In 2010, Wang Chun embarked on his first trip abroad—Nepal followed by India. That trip took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded the Himsagar Express, then India's longest non-stop train service, train number 16317, traveling from Kanyakumari to Kashmir and continuing his journey in the country.
That trip 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 and even the second, and posted these records on online forums and message boards. Someone once gave me a nickname, ‘Thousand-Time High-Speed Rail Hero,’ because I was counting the number of times I had taken the high-speed rail and moving toward the goal of taking it 1,000 times.”
Wang Chun revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had taken the high-speed rail a total of 854 times, but he had taken civil aviation flights nearly 1,000 times.
The accumulation of wealth, skills, and resources stems from cryptocurrencies.
Besides traveling, Wang Chun also showed a strong interest in various emerging technologies.
Wang Chun first heard about computers when he was 7 years old, but he didn't own his first 486SX computer running MS-DOS 5.0 until he graduated from elementary school at the age of 13.
Wang Chun mentioned, "Besides playing games, I also used it to write many interesting programs, the earliest of which was a gravity simulator that can visually demonstrate 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). Because of my outstanding performance in these competitions, I didn't have to take the college entrance examination and was directly admitted to university. "
In 2011, Wang Chun first heard about Bitcoin through the technology website Solidot, and on May 28 of that year, he bought his first Bitcoin at a price of $8.70.
At the same time, Wang Chun, a tech geek, also began to try assembling mining machines himself to mine Bitcoin.
The story didn't start smoothly. Wang Chun initially partnered with Wu Gang, the later founder of Bixin, renting a few houses and building a relatively rudimentary mining farm with dozens of machines. The initial capital was even borrowed from his father… But even so, Wang Chun still managed to mine 7,700 Bitcoins in two years. Of these, 4,000 were used to pay electricity bills, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone (which was later stolen in a St. Petersburg metro station), and the remaining Bitcoins were sold off in early 2013 for $17…
The turning point came in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (known in the cryptocurrency community as "FishPool") in Wenzhou with Mao Shixing, nicknamed "Shenyu" (God Fish) . The more introverted Wang Chun was responsible for the backend code, while the more extroverted Shenyu was in charge of operations. This was China's first Bitcoin mining pool, which later developed into one of the world's largest comprehensive mining pools.
In 2018, Wang Chun founded his second company, Stake.fish, in Thailand. Stake.fish is a staking service provider that focuses on PoS networks and provides node staking services for PoS networks such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polygon.
The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, coupled with the surge in cryptocurrency prices, has amassed a huge personal fortune for Wang Chun. In 2025, Wang Chun revealed that F2Pool had mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins in the past decade.
Space Dream Chaser
Wang Chun's rapid increase in wealth enabled him to realize his childhood dream of traveling to the polar regions. In December 2021, Wang Chun successfully reached the South Pole; in July 2023, he reached the North Pole.
But after realizing his dream, Wang Chun discovered that this alone was not enough... His entire life was spent on a journey, constantly moving towards the unknown distance.
- 2006: He traveled west to the Kazakh border at 82° east longitude;
- 2011: He traveled to the southernmost point of India, reaching 8° North latitude;
- 2012: He traveled to Europe by Trans-Siberian Railway, arriving in St. Petersburg at 60° North latitude and 30° East longitude;
- 2013: He traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, heading east to 160° east longitude;
- 2016: He traveled to 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 is no further destination on Earth, so where can we go?
Wang Chun quickly found the answer: "Since SpaceX began recovering the Falcon 9 first stage rocket, the commercial space industry has been moving forward at an incredible pace. I'm seeing something completely new and exciting unfolding again, just like when I first heard about computers or first discovered Bitcoin. "
Wang Chun's choice was to fly into space. In 2023, Wang Chun proposed an extremely bold idea to SpaceX—to privately purchase one of SpaceX's "Crew Dragon" missions and fly over the Earth's North and South Poles.
Wang Chun's idea is that since humanity entered space in 1961, the vast majority of rocket launches have been concentrated near the equator or in mid-latitude regions, meaning that the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous manned spacecraft (except for the Apollo moon landing missions which flew over from a distance) have been unable to cross the Earth's North and South Poles. In other words, the polar ice caps have been a visual and scientific void in the history of near-Earth orbit manned spaceflight for 60 years. Therefore, Wang Chun hopes to take a polar retrograde orbit, which has never been traversed before, with an orbital inclination of 90 degrees, directly crossing and overlooking the Earth's poles.
Wang Chun named the mission "Fram2" in honor of the legendary polar research vessel "Fram," which carried Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic.
On April 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Resilience Dragon spacecraft lifted off on schedule from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Wang Chun, as Mission Commander, led a crew of civilians and non-Americans (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian Arctic explorer) personally selected by him on their space journey.
At a 90-degree polar orbit with an apogee of 413 kilometers and a perigee of 202 kilometers, the spacecraft orbits the Earth every 93 minutes, traveling from the North Pole to the South Pole in just 46 minutes. During the three-and-a-half-day mission, Wang Chun and his crew completed a large number of extremely rigorous scientific and visual capture tasks —including close-up observation of STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), a rare and unique high-latitude atmospheric phenomenon; taking the first-ever X-ray of space in microgravity; and the first-ever attempt to cultivate fungi in microgravity…
One noteworthy detail is that Wang Chun's friend, Bao Erye, revealed in an article before the mission began that Wang Chun had not made any backup of his Bitcoin private key. He stated that if he encountered danger during the mission, his Bitcoin holdings would be permanently destroyed.
Flying to Mars
Wang Chun's space dream did not end with the successful landing of Fram2, but continues to evolve.
Returning to the story at the beginning, just before SpaceX tested the launch of its latest generation Starship, SpaceX officially announced two major space programs for Wang Chun during a live broadcast: a week-long manned lunar flyby mission and a two-year manned interplanetary Mars mission, the first of its kind in human history.
When SpaceX connected with Wang Chun via live stream, he was standing in the midst of a gale on Bouvet Island at 54°26′S, 3°24′E. The island is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, close to Antarctica, and is an overseas territory of Norway (the Norwegian Antarctic Territory), outside the territory frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.
On Wang Chun's personal X homepage (which you can access directly via niubi.com), she provides detailed updates on her travel progress. As of this writing, her current progress is: " Checked in on 60% of the map on 1 star (150/249), to be continued... "
