Author: Youth Unexpected Wealth Development Association
In any case, this is destined to be a week that will go down in history.
On June 12th, the largest IPO in human history will take place. SpaceX is a behemoth created by Elon Musk, embodying the world's richest man's ultimate dream of interstellar colonization.
Over the past decade, SpaceX's Falcon rockets have launched a total of 656 times.
In 2025 alone, there were 165 launches—almost half of all launches into orbit worldwide.
The Dragon spacecraft has carried out more than 20 manned missions, sending more than 70 people into orbit.
The word "Mars" appeared 63 times in SpaceX's prospectus. The "Mars exploration program" is also Musk's number one project, betting his entire future.
But the protagonist of this article is neither SpaceX nor Musk, but the captain who will soon command the first manned Mars spacecraft—Wang Chun, a Bitcoin billionaire from Tianjin.
Wang Chun spent her childhood with her grandparents.
In 1987, when Wang Chun was five years old, his grandfather found a world map while taking a walk. From then on, that map became his most beloved toy.
What fascinated him wasn't the named places, but the blank space at the bottom of the map—the polar regions. Five-year-old Wang Chun often stared intently at these most remote and untouched corners of the earth. He later said that from that moment on, he was captivated by those distant and unknown places.
In reality, he didn't go to a place more than 100 kilometers away from home until he went to university at the age of eighteen.
At that time, Wang Chun had no idea how vast the world he would be exploring in his lifetime.
When Wang Chun was thirteen, he got his first computer. Besides playing games, he used it to write a lot of programs, the earliest of which was a gravity simulator that could visualize the movement of planets in the solar system.
At school, Wang Chun participated in various programming competitions, including the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and the ACM-ICPC. Later, based on his achievements in these competitions, he skipped the college entrance examination and was directly admitted to university.
After graduation, Wang Chun joined a software company in Beijing, and from that time on, he became fascinated with taking trains.
In 2007, he used all his weekends to travel 75,900 kilometers by train, recording every train journey down to the minute and second, and posting the records on forums.
That year, he spent a total of two months entirely in the train carriage, going straight to the train station after get off work every Friday and not returning to work until the following Monday.
Wang Chun thus gained the online nickname "High-Speed Rail Man Who Takes a Thousand Trips".
Over the years, he traveled by train to all the provinces of China.
In 2010, Wang Chun traveled abroad for the first time, first to Nepal and then to India. There, he boarded what was then India's longest direct train—the Himalayan Express No. 16317—and rode from Kanyakumari, the southernmost point of the subcontinent, all the way to Kashmir, the northernmost point, traversing the entire country from south to north.
The trip cost about $1,000, which was all of Wang Chun's savings at the time.
In 2013, Wang Chun staked his coding skills on something that almost no one understood at the time—Bitcoin.
He partnered with "Shenyu" to set up China's first Bitcoin mining pool, named F2Pool, specifically for mining Bitcoin.
F2Pool's growth has been astonishing. Within just one year of its founding, F2Pool became the world's largest Bitcoin mining pool; over the next ten years, more than 1.3 million Bitcoins were mined from this pool.
At its peak, F2Pool controlled more than 30% of the network's computing power. In other words, roughly one out of every three Bitcoins mined in the world during those years came from Wang Chun's pool.
By selling shovels, Wang Chun amassed a fortune and became a prominent Bitcoin billionaire.
After earning money, Wang Chun finally had the opportunity to realize her childhood dream of traveling around the world and exploring the polar regions.
On April 1, 2025, Wang Chun took his 1,000th flight, but this time the destination was not any city, but the real distance—space.
△This flight aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will be Wang Chun's 1000th flight to date.
This mission, codenamed Fram2, was launched by SpaceX's most mature and most frequently used crew spacecraft, the Dragon.
Its flight path is quite unique: it takes off from Florida and enters a rare polar orbit, running close to the North and South Poles, circling the entire Earth "vertically".
For this voyage, Wang Chun personally funded the booking of all four seats on the Dragon spacecraft, costing a total of approximately two hundred million US dollars. He also personally selected three teammates for himself: a cinematographer, a robotics expert, and a polar explorer.
△The four astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose for a photo in the spacesuit dressing room near Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center.
He personally designed the mission plan and the unique flight path, aiming to fulfill his childhood fantasy about the polar regions.
Over the next three and a half days, they circled the Earth, taking numerous photos of the poles and auroras from a space perspective, and also captured the first X-ray image of a human in space.
After returning from space, people both marveled at Wang Chun's extreme challenges and envied her for finally achieving her ultimate goal in life.
But to everyone's surprise, all of this is just a warm-up for Wang Chun.
On May 21, 2026, SpaceX unveiled its next-generation spacecraft, Starship. During the live broadcast, SpaceX also announced that Chun Wang would serve as commander of the first manned mission to Mars.
This was a journey that took almost two years.
The spaceship will carry him out of the Earth-Moon system, towards Mars, and then back to Earth, a journey spanning hundreds of millions of kilometers. For most of these two years, he will be confined to the cramped cabin, drifting in the dark depths of space.
Before heading to Mars, Wang Chun will also embark on a week-long lunar flyby with Dennis Tito and his wife, the first self-funded space tourists in human history. The flyby will bring them as close as about 200 kilometers to the lunar surface.
In the two years following the launch of the manned Mars mission, Wang Chun and his team will conduct extensive data collection in deep space, aiming to obtain crucial operational data for humanity. This will transform Mars exploration from a short-term, novel endeavor into a sustainable and self-sufficient home for long-term human habitation.
For Musk and SpaceX, flying past Mars has never been the goal.
Musk envisions building a real city on Mars. To achieve this, thousands of starships will be launched approximately every twenty-six months to transport equipment and people there. Construction of the Martian city will initially begin with the priority delivery of millions of tons of equipment and supplies, with the final arrival of one million people willing to live on Mars.
Humanity will henceforth become a true "interplanetary species".
The Mars mission that Wang Chun will be carrying out in the next two years is the first step towards this crazy plan.
In the past, when most people talked about commercial spaceflight companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, they were always amazed by the frighteningly high costs, or gossiped about the wealthy people who spent money like water.
It seems that when it comes to discussing the door to space, all that's left is the topic of "money."
In terms of money, Wang Chun isn't even the richest person in the industry. The likes of Zhao Changpeng and Sun Yuchen are hundreds of times wealthier.
In the world of Bitcoin, a breeding ground for get-rich-quick stories, he's at best considered above average.
But for Wang Chun, money has always been just a tool, not an end in itself.
The decadent lifestyle in the cryptocurrency world largely stems from the rapid growth of wealth, which has fueled the greed of too many people, causing many to lose control.
But Wang Chun doesn't seem like someone from the cryptocurrency world at all.
While everyone else was looking down at their money, he was the only one who looked up and started counting the stars.
When he was on the Fram2 mission, his entire net worth was only a few hundred million dollars, but without batting an eye, he pulled out a full two hundred million dollars and took his expedition team into space. He had staked almost half of his fortune on this three-and-a-half-day journey.
Compared to many of his peers who plunge into a life of pleasure and debauchery after making money, Wang Chun's simplicity and purity are truly rare in this day and age.
In an interview with CBS, he spoke about the significance of the mission: "It's not just about going to space, it's about pushing boundaries and sharing knowledge. We hope that stories like this will inspire more people to pursue their curiosity."
As Stefan Zweig wrote in "The Stars of Humanity," "The greatest fortune in a person's life is to discover his mission in the middle of his life, when he is in the prime of his life."
Few people in this world are willing to risk venturing into those remote and harsh corners to explore our planet; even fewer are willing to spend their fortunes to actively seek out extreme environments.
Wang Chun is clearly one of those lucky people.
