天津衛走出的80後，即將成為第一個去火星的人

Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Humanity is finally embarking on a 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, made a blockbuster announcement — F2Pool co-founder and Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang will board the Starship to execute the first crewed interplanetary Mars aviation mission! This mission plans a two-year deep-space flight, leaving the Earth-Moon system, skimming past Mars (without landing), and finally returning to Earth.

Prior to this mission, Wang will also participate in the first commercial crewed lunar flyby mission on the Starship alongside Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito. This mission is expected to last for one week and will fly approximately 200 kilometers above the lunar surface.

The Travel Enthusiast from Tianjin

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

Born in Tianjin, China, in 1982, Wang was raised by his grandparents. Until he left for university in 2000, he had rarely ever left his hometown.

However, from a very young age, Wang developed a keen interest in travel, always fantasizing about traveling the world: “In 1987, when I was five years old, my grandfather brought back a world map he found during a walk. That map instantly became my favorite toy and sparked my curiosity. What truly captivated me was the vast blank area at the bottom of the map: the polar regions. From that moment, I was deeply drawn to the mystery and excitement of those distant, unknown places.”

After leaving university, Wang first worked at a Norwegian software company in Beijing. From then on, his travel mileage truly began to skyrocket – to save money, he often slept on a colleague's couch in France 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. By train, he traversed every province in China.

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

That journey ultimately cost him about $1,000, which was all the savings he had at the time.

“In 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 nicknamed me ‘Thousand-Rides High-Speed Rail Guy,’ because I was counting my high-speed rail rides, aiming towards the goal of 1,000 rides.”

Wang revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he has taken 854 high-speed rail trips, but the number of times he has flown on commercial airlines is very close to 1,000.

Wealth, Ability, and Resource Accumulation Stemming from Cryptocurrency

Apart 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 primary school at 13 that he owned his first computer, a 486SX running MS-DOS 5.0.

Wang mentioned: “Besides playing games, I also used it to write many interesting programs. One of the earliest was a gravity simulator that could visually demonstrate planetary motion 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 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 began trying to build his own mining rigs for Bitcoin mining.

The initial story wasn't smooth. Wang first partnered with Wu Gang (later founder of币信/Bixin), rented a few residential houses, and built a relatively rudimentary mining farm with dozens of machines, even borrowing the start-up capital from his father… But even so, Wang mined 7,700 Bitcoins over two years. Of these, 4,000 went towards electricity bills, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone (which was later stolen at the St. Petersburg metro station), and the remaining Bitcoins were sold off at a price of $17 in early 2023...

The turning point came in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (known in the crypto community as 'Fish Pool') with Mao Shixing, nicknamed 'Shenyu' (Godlike Fish), in Wenzhou. The more introverted Wang was responsible for the 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, Polygon, etc.

The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, combined 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.

Dreamer of Space

The rapid growth in wealth allowed 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 reached the North Pole.

But after fulfilling these dreams, Wang found that simply doing so was somehow not enough… His whole life has been a journey, continuously advancing towards the unknown.

• 2006: He traveled west, reaching the Kazakhstan border at 82°E.
• 2011: He traveled to the southernmost tip of India, reaching 8°N.
• 2012: He traveled to Europe via the Trans-Siberian Railway, reaching St. Petersburg at 60°N, 30°E.
• 2013: He traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching 160°E eastward.
• 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 destinations left on Earth. Where else could he go?

Wang quickly found the answer: “Since SpaceX started recovering the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, the commercial space industry has been advancing at an incredible pace. I once again saw something entirely new and exciting unfolding, feeling 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 and fully fund a SpaceX “Crew Dragon” mission that would fly over Earth's poles.

Wang's rationale was that since humans entered space in 1961, because the vast majority of rocket launches have been concentrated near the equator or mid-latitudes, the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous crewed spacecraft (except for the Apollo lunar missions that flew by distant) have never flown over Earth's poles. In other words, Earth's polar ice caps represent a 60-year visual and scientific blank in the history of low-Earth orbit crewed spaceflight. Therefore, Wang hoped to take a polar orbit never traversed before, at a 90-degree orbital inclination, directly crossing and overlooking Earth's poles.

Wang named the mission "Fram2," in honor of the legendary polar research vessel "Fram," which 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 self-selected, fully civilian, and entirely non-US crew (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian polar explorer) officially on their space journey.

In 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 Pole to the South Pole. During the three-and-a-half-day flight mission, Wang and his crew completed a large amount of extremely hardcore scientific research and visual capture – including close-up observation of STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement), an extremely rare high-altitude atmospheric phenomenon unique to high latitudes; capturing humanity's first X-ray image in space; and humanity's first attempt to grow fungi in a microgravity environment…

One notable detail is that Wang's friend, Bào Èr Yé, posted before the mission started, revealing that Wang had not made any backup of his Bitcoin private keys, stating that if he encountered danger during the mission, his held Bitcoins would be considered permanently destroyed.

Flying to Mars

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

Returning to the opening story, just before SpaceX tested the latest generation Starship launch, SpaceX officially made a blockbuster announcement live, revealing Wang's subsequent two space plans – a one-week crewed lunar flyby mission and a full two-year mission, humanity's first crewed interplanetary Mars aviation mission.

When SpaceX connected live with Wang, he was standing in the gale on Bouvet Island, at 54°26′S, 3°24′E. Located in the South Atlantic, near Antarctica, this island is a Norwegian overseas territory (Queen Maud Land) and lies outside the land area frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.

On Wang's personal X profile page, he details his travel progress. As of this writing, the current status is: “Checked in 60% of the map on 1 celestial body (150 / 249), to be continued…”