天津卫走出的80后，即将成为第一个去火星的人

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Humanity is finally about to set foot on 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, made a blockbuster announcement — F2Pool co-founder and Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang will ride the Starship to execute the first crewed interplanetary Mars aviation mission! This 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 participate in Starship’s first commercial crewed lunar flyby mission alongside Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito. This mission is expected to last one week and will fly approximately 200 kilometers above the lunar surface.

The Travel Fanatic from Tianjin

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

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

However, from a very young age, Wang developed a profound interest in travel. He constantly fantasized about traveling 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 captivated me was the huge blank area at the bottom of the map — the polar regions. From that moment on, I was deeply attracted by the mystery and excitement of those distant, unknown places."

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

Wang mentioned, "Despite having a full-time job, in 2007 alone, I traveled 75,900 kilometers by train on weekends. All told, I spent a full two months of 2007 inside train carriages. Every Friday after work, I would head straight to the train station and wouldn't return to the office until Monday morning."

Over the next four years, Wang further expanded his travel map. He visited every province in China by train.

In 2010, Wang embarked on his first international trip — Nepal, followed by India. That trip took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded what was then India's longest non-stop train service, the 16317 Himsagar Express, traveling from Kanyakumari all the way to Kashmir, continuing his journey across the country.

That entire journey ultimately cost him about $1,000 — his entire life savings at the time.

"In those years, I was obsessed with infrastructure and modes of transportation, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train ride, down to the minute or even second, and posted these records on online forums and message boards. Someone once nicknamed me 'Thousand High-Speed Rail Trips Guy' because I was counting my rides toward a goal of 1,000 high-speed train trips."

Wang revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had taken 854 high-speed train rides, but his number of civil aviation flights was extremely close to 1,000.

Wealth, Ability, and Resource Accumulation from Cryptocurrency

Aside from travel, Wang also showed a very strong interest in various emerging technologies.

At age 7, Wang first heard about computers, but it wasn't until he graduated from elementary school at 13 that he got his first computer, a 486SX running MS-DOS 5.0.

Wang noted, "Besides playing games, I also used it to write many interesting programs. One of the earliest was a gravitational simulator that could visually show the movement of planets in the solar system... In school, I participated in various programming competitions, including the International Olympiad in Informatics (IOI) and ACM-ICPC (International Collegiate Programming Contest). Due to my excellent performance in these competitions, I was directly recommended for university without taking the college entrance exam."

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.

At the same time, as a tech geek, Wang also started trying to build his own mining rigs to mine Bitcoin.

The initial story was not smooth. Wang first collaborated with Wu Gang, who would later found Bixin, renting several residential houses and setting up a relatively rudimentary mining farm with dozens of machines, even borrowing startup funds from his father... But even so, Wang still managed to obtain 7,700 Bitcoins through mining over two years. Of these, 4,000 were used to pay electricity bills, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone (which was later stolen at a St. Petersburg metro station), and the remaining Bitcoins were liquidated by him at $17 in early 2023...

The turning point came in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (familiar to the crypto community as "Fish Pool") with Mao Shihang, 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, later evolving into one of the world's largest comprehensive mining pools.

In 2018, Wang founded his second company in Thailand, Stake.fish, a staking service provider focused on PoS networks, comprehensively laying out 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, accumulated immense personal wealth for Wang — In 2025, Wang revealed that over the past decade or so, F2Pool had mined over 1.3 million Bitcoins.

Space Dream Chaser

Rapid wealth growth allowed Wang to realize 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 his dreams, Wang found that this alone seemed insufficient... He had spent his entire life on the road, continuously advancing towards unknown horizons.

• 2006: Traveled westward to the Kazakhstan border at 82° East longitude;
• 2011: Traveled to the southernmost tip of India, reaching 8° North latitude;
• 2012: Traveled to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway, arriving in St. Petersburg at 60° North, 30° East;
• 2013: Traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching 160° East longitude;
• 2016: First trip to the United States;
• December 2021: Successfully reached the South Pole;
• July 2023: Successfully reached the North Pole...

But now, there are no further destinations left on Earth, so where else could he go?

Wang quickly found the answer: "Since SpaceX began recovering the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, the commercial space industry has been advancing at an incredible pace. I saw something entirely new and exciting unfolding once again. It felt exactly the same as when I first heard about computers or first discovered Bitcoin."

Wang's choice was to fly into space. In 2023, Wang proposed an extremely bold idea to SpaceX — hoping to privately fund the entire cost of a SpaceX Crew Dragon mission, flying over a polar orbit traversing the Earth's poles.

Wang's rationale was that since humans entered space in 1961, because the vast majority of rocket launches are concentrated near the equator or mid-latitudes, the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous crewed spacecraft (except the Apollo lunar missions which flew over from afar) have never been able to fly over the Earth's poles. In other words, the polar ice caps represented a 60-year visual and scientific gap in human near-Earth orbital spaceflight history. Therefore, Wang wanted to take a path never taken before — a polar retrograde orbit at a 90-degree orbital inclination, crossing directly over and overlooking the Earth's poles.

Wang named the mission "Fram2," in honor of the legendary polar exploration ship "Fram" which had carried Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic.

On April 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Resilience Crew Dragon capsule 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, all-non-US crew (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian Arctic explorer) on their official 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 just 46 minutes to fly from the North to the South Pole. Over the three-and-a-half-day mission, Wang and his crew completed a large amount of extremely rigorous scientific research and visual capture — including close-up observation of the extremely rare high-altitude atmospheric phenomenon STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), the capture of the first-ever X-ray image in space under microgravity, and the first human attempt to grow fungal organisms in a microgravity environment...

A notable detail: Wang's close friend, "Bao Erye," revealed in a post before the mission that Wang had not made any backup of his Bitcoin private keys, stating that if he were in danger during the mission, his Bitcoin holdings would be effectively permanently destroyed.

Flying to Mars

Wang's space dreams did not end with the successful completion of Fram2; they continue to escalate.

Returning to the story at the beginning, on the eve of SpaceX's latest Starship test launch, SpaceX officially announced Wang's two subsequent space plans during a live broadcast — a one-week crewed lunar flyby mission and a full two-year crewed interplanetary Mars aviation mission, the first of its kind in human history.

When SpaceX connected with Wang live, he was standing in the fierce wind of Bouvet Island at 54°26′S, 3°24′E. This island, located in the South Atlantic Ocean near Antarctica, is a Norwegian overseas territory (Norwegian Antarctic Territory) and lies outside the land area frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.

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