The post-80s guy from Tianjin is about to become the first person to go to Mars

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Humanity is finally about to embark on the journey to Mars, and the protagonist of this space mission, destined to be etched into human history, is a native of Tianjin.

On the morning of May 22, Beijing time, SpaceX, on the verge of its IPO, dropped a major announcement — F2Pool co-founder and Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang will ride the Starship to execute the first crewed interplanetary Mars flyby mission! The mission plans a two-year deep space flight, exiting the Earth-Moon system, flying past Mars (without landing), and finally returning to Earth.

Prior to this mission, Wang will also join Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito on Starship's first commercial crewed lunar flyby mission, expected to last one week, skimming approximately 200 kilometers above the lunar surface.

The Travel Maniac from Tianjin

On March 31, 2025, on the eve of the Fram2 mission launch, Wang gave an exclusive interview to the space industry media outlet Spaceflight Now, revealing many previously unknown stories of his upbringing.

Born in Tianjin, China in 1982, Wang was raised by his grandparents and hardly ever left his hometown until he went to university in 2000.

But from a very young age, Wang developed a keen interest in travel, always dreaming of traveling around the world: "In 1987, when I was 5 years old, my grandfather brought back a world map he found during a walk. That map instantly became my favorite toy and ignited my curiosity. What truly captured my attention was the vast blank area at the bottom of the map – the polar regions. From that moment on, I was deeply drawn to the mystery and excitement of those distant, unknown lands."

After graduating from university, Wang first worked for a Norwegian software company in Beijing. It was from then on that his travel mileage truly skyrocketed — to save money, he often slept on French colleagues' sofas or directly in the office, commuting back home about 120 kilometers away on weekends.

Wang mentioned: "Despite having a full-time job, in just 2007 alone, I traveled 75,900 kilometers by train on weekends. All told, I spent a full two months of 2007 inside train carriages, leaving for the train station right after work on Fridays and not returning to the office until Monday morning."

Over the next four years, Wang further expanded his travel map. By train, he traversed every province in China.

In 2010, Wang embarked on his first overseas trip — Nepal, followed by India. That journey took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded the Himsagar Express (Train 16317), then the longest non-stop train route in India, traveling from Kanyakumari all the way to Kashmir, continuing his travels across the country.

That trip ultimately cost him about $1,000, which was his entire savings at the time.

"During those years, I was fascinated by infrastructure and vehicles, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train journey, down to the minute and even second, and posted these records on online forums and message boards. Someone once nicknamed me 'The Thousand High-Speed Rail Warrior' because I was counting my high-speed rail rides, aiming for a thousand trips."

Wang revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had taken 854 high-speed rail trips, but the number of times he had flown on commercial aircraft was extremely close to 1,000.

Wealth, Capability, and Resource Accumulation Stem from Cryptocurrency

Apart from travel, Wang also displayed a strong interest in various emerging technologies.

At age 7, Wang first heard about computers, but didn't get his own 486SX running MS-DOS 5.0 until he graduated elementary school at 13.

Wang mentioned: "Besides playing games, I also used it to write many fun programs. One of the earliest was a gravity simulator that visually showed the motion of planets in the solar system... At school, I participated in various programming competitions, including the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and ACM-ICPC. Due to my outstanding performance in these competitions, I was directly recommended for university admission without taking the college entrance exam (Gaokao)."

In 2011, Wang first heard about Bitcoin through the tech website Solidot, and on May 28 of that year, he bought his first Bitcoin at a unit price of $8.7.

Simultaneously, as a tech geek, Wang also started trying to build mining rigs himself to mine Bitcoin.

The initial story wasn't smooth sailing. Wang first partnered with Wu Gang, the future founder of Bixin, renting a few residential houses and using dozens of units to build a relatively crude mining farm, even borrowing the startup capital from his father... But even so, Wang managed to mine 7,700 Bitcoins over two years. 4,000 of them went towards electricity bills, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone (which was subsequently stolen at a St. Petersburg metro station), and the remaining Bitcoins were sold off in early 2023 at $17...

The turning point came in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (known as 'Yuchi' in the crypto community) with Mao Shixing, nicknamed 'Shenyu,' in Wenzhou. The more introverted Wang was responsible for backend code, while the more outgoing Shenyu handled operations. It was China's first Bitcoin mining pool and later evolved into one of the world's largest comprehensive mining pools.

In 2018, Wang founded his second company, Stake.fish, in Thailand. This staking service provider focused on Proof-of-Stake networks, comprehensively deploying node staking services for PoS networks like Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polygon.

The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, coupled with the surge in cryptocurrency prices, amassed immense personal wealth for Wang — Wang revealed in 2025 that over the past decade or so, F2Pool has mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins.

Space Dream Chaser

The rapid growth of his wealth enabled Wang to fulfill his childhood dream of traveling to the polar regions. In December 2021, Wang successfully reached the South Pole; in July 2023, he arrived at the North Pole.

But after fulfilling these dreams, Wang found that just this wasn't enough... His entire life has been a journey, continuously moving towards unknown distances.

• 2006: He traveled west to the Kazakhstan border at longitude 82°E;
• 2011: He traveled to the southernmost tip of India, reaching latitude 8°N;
• 2012: He traveled to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway, reaching St. Petersburg at latitude 60°N, longitude 30°E;
• 2013: He traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching east to longitude 160°E;
• 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 are no further destinations left on Earth. Where can he go next?

Wang quickly found the answer: "Since SpaceX started recovering Falcon 9 first-stage rockets, the commercial space industry has advanced at an incredible pace. I saw something entirely new and exciting unfolding again. It felt exactly the same as when I first heard about the computer, or when I first discovered Bitcoin."

Wang's choice was to fly into space. In 2023, Wang proposed an extremely bold concept to SpaceX — privately fully-funding a Crew Dragon mission to fly on a polar orbit trajectory passing over both Earth's poles.

Wang reasoned that since humans entered space in 1961, due to most rocket launches being concentrated near the equator or mid-latitudes, the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous crewed spacecraft (except for the Apollo lunar missions flying by at a distance) had never flown over Earth's poles. In other words, the polar ice caps represented a 60-year visual and scientific blank in low-Earth orbit crewed spaceflight history. Therefore, Wang wanted to take a polar retrograde orbit path never traveled before, with a 90-degree orbital inclination, directly crossing and overlooking Earth's poles.

Wang named the mission "Fram2," in honor of the legendary polar expedition ship "Fram" that once carried Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic.

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. Wang, serving as Mission Commander, led his carefully selected all-civilian, entirely non-American crew (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian Arctic explorer) on their space journey.

On a 90-degree polar orbit with an apogee of 413 km and a perigee of 202 km, the spacecraft circled 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 mission, Wang and his crew completed a vast amount of extremely hardcore scientific research and visual capture — including close-up observation of STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), a rare high-altitude atmospheric phenomenon unique to high latitudes; capturing the first-ever X-ray image in space under microgravity; attempting the first growth of fungi in a microgravity environment in human history...

Notably, Wang's good friend 'Bao Erye' revealed in a post before the mission started that Wang had made no backup of his Bitcoin private keys, stating that if he encountered danger during the mission, his Bitcoin holdings would be considered permanently destroyed.

Flying to Mars

Wang's space dreams did not end with the successful landing of Fram2 but continued to escalate.

Returning to the opening story, just before SpaceX tested the latest generation Starship launch, SpaceX officially announced Wang's subsequent two space plans during a livestream — a one-week crewed lunar flyby mission, and a full two-year, humanity's first crewed interplanetary Mars flyby mission.

When SpaceX connected with Wang live, he was standing in the gale winds of Bouvet Island, at 54°26′S, 3°24′E. This island, located in the South Atlantic near Antarctica, is a Norwegian overseas territory (part of the Norwegian Antarctic Territories), outside the area covered by the Antarctic Treaty freeze on territorial claims.

On Wang's personal X profile, he provides detailed updates on his travel progress. As of writing, the current status is: "Checked in on 60% of the map on 1 celestial body (150 / 249), to be continued..."