Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜Azuma (@azuma_eth)

Humanity is finally set to embark on a journey to Mars, and the main character of this space mission, which is destined to go down in human history, is a person from Tianjin.

On the morning of May 22, Beijing time, the soon-to-be IPO SpaceX made a significant announcement —— F2Pool co-founder, Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang will board the Starship to execute the first manned interstellar Mars aviation mission! This mission is planned for a two-year deep space flight, passing by Mars (without landing) after exiting the Earth-Moon system, and finally returning to Earth.

Before this mission, Chun Wang will also participate in Starship's first commercial lunar flyby mission alongside Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito, which is expected to last a week and will skim about 200 kilometers from the Moon's surface.

The Travel Enthusiast from Tianjin

On the eve of the Fram2 mission launch on March 31, 2025, Chun Wang was interviewed by the aerospace professional media Spaceflight Now, where he revealed many unknown growth stories.

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

However, from a very young age, Chun Wang developed a strong interest in travel, often fantasizing about traveling around the world: “In 1987, when I was 5 years old, my grandfather brought home a world map he found while walking. That map instantly became my favorite toy and ignited my curiosity. What really caught my attention was the huge blank area at the bottom of the map — the polar regions. From that moment on, I was deeply fascinated by the mystery and excitement of those distant and unknown places.”

After leaving college, Chun Wang first worked for a Norwegian software company in Beijing, and since then, his travel mileage began to soar — to save money, he often slept on the sofa of a French colleague or directly in the office, commuting back home about 120 kilometers away on weekends.

Chun Wang mentioned: “Despite having a full-time job, I traveled 75,900 kilometers by train during the weekends alone in 2007. Overall, I spent almost two months in train carriages that year, rushing to the train station every Friday after work and only returning to the company the following Monday morning.”

In the next four years, Chun Wang further expanded his travel map. By train, he traveled through every province in China.

In 2010, Chun Wang began his first trip abroad — after Nepal, he went to India. That trip took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded the longest-running non-stop train in India at the time — the 16317 Himsagar Express, traveling from Kanyakumari all the way to Kashmir, continuing his journey in the country.

The trip ultimately cost him about $1,000, which was all his savings at that time.

“During those years, I was very obsessed with infrastructure and means of transportation, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train journey, down to the minute and even the second, and shared these records on online forums and message boards. Someone even nicknamed me 'Thousand Times High-Speed Rail Hero' because I was counting the times I had taken high-speed trains, aiming towards riding 1,000 times.”

Chun Wang revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had taken 854 high-speed trains, but his flights on commercial airlines were very close to 1,000.

Wealth, Skills, and Resource Accumulation from Cryptocurrency

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

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

Chun Wang mentioned: “Besides playing games, I also wrote many interesting programs on it, including the earliest one, which 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 did not take the college entrance examination but was directly admitted to university.”

In 2011, Chun Wang first learned about Bitcoin through the tech website Solidot, and on May 28 of that year, he bought his first Bitcoin for $8.7.

Meanwhile, as a tech geek, Chun Wang also began to assemble mining rigs to mine Bitcoin himself.

The initial story was not smooth. Chun Wang first cooperated with Wu Gang, the later founder of Bixin, rented a few houses, and built a relatively rudimentary mining site with dozens of machines, with the startup capital even borrowed from his father... But despite this, Chun Wang managed to mine 7,700 Bitcoins over the course of two years, of which 4,000 were used to pay electricity bills, 660 were exchanged for an iPhone (which was later stolen at a subway station in St. Petersburg), and some remaining Bitcoins were sold off at the beginning of 2023 at a price of $17...

The turning point in the story occurred in 2013. In April of that year, he co-founded F2Pool (known as "Fish Pool" in the cryptocurrency community) in Wenzhou with a person nicknamed “Shen Yu,” with the introverted Chun Wang responsible for the backend code, and the more extroverted Shen Yu in charge of operations. This was the first Bitcoin mining pool in China, which later developed into one of the largest comprehensive mining pools in the world.

In 2018, Chun Wang established a second company, Stake.fish, in Thailand, a staking service provider focused on POS networks, fully engaging in the node staking services for PoS networks such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polygon.

The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, coupled with the skyrocketing cryptocurrency prices, allowed Chun Wang to accumulate a fortune — in 2025, Chun Wang revealed that over the past decade, F2Pool had mined more than 1.3 million Bitcoins.

The Dreamer of Space

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

However, after realizing his dream, Chun Wang found that it still didn’t seem enough... His life has been a journey, continuously moving towards the unknown distance.

• 2006: He traveled west to the Kazakhstan border at 82°E;
• 2011: He went to the southernmost tip of India, reaching 8°N;
• 2012: He took the Trans-Siberian Railway to Europe, arriving at 60°N, 30°E in St. Petersburg;
• 2013: He traveled to the Kamchatka Peninsula, reaching 160°E to the east;
• 2016: He went 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 endpoints on Earth, where else can one go?

Chun 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 speed. I once again saw something new and exciting unfolding, a feeling just like when I first heard about computers or discovered Bitcoin.”

Chun Wang's choice is to fly into space. In 2023, Chun Wang proposed an extremely bold idea to SpaceX — hoping to privately and fully purchase a “Crew Dragon” mission from SpaceX, aiming to fly over the Earth's polar orbits.

Chun Wang's idea is that since humans entered space in 1961, the vast majority of rocket launches have been concentrated near the equator or mid-latitude regions, meaning that the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous manned spacecraft (except for the distant Apollo lunar landing missions) have never been able to fly over the Earth's north and south poles. In other words, the polar ice caps have represented a 60-year visual and scientific blank in the history of near-Earth orbital manned spaceflight. Therefore, Chun Wang hopes to take an unprecedented polar retrograde orbit, with a 90-degree orbital inclination, directly crossing and overlooking the Earth's poles.

Chun Wang named the mission “Fram2,” in honor of the legendary polar research ship “Fram,” which carried Norwegian explorers to the North and South Poles in history.

On April 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the “Resilience” Crew Dragon launched on time from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Chun Wang, as the mission commander, led a purely civilian and fully non-American crew (including a Norwegian filmmaker, a German robotics engineer, and an Australian Arctic explorer) on their official space journey.

In a 90-degree polar orbit with an apogee of 413 kilometers and a perigee of 202 kilometers, the spacecraft circles the Earth every 93 minutes, with just 46 minutes needed to fly from the North Pole to the South Pole. During a three-and-a-half-day flight mission, Chun Wang and the crew accomplished a significant amount of extremely hardcore scientific research and visual capture — including close observation of the extremely rare atmospheric phenomenon STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) unique to high-latitude regions of Earth; capturing the first space X-ray image in human history in a microgravity environment; and attempting to grow fungal organisms in a microgravity environment for the first time in human history...

It is worth mentioning that one detail is that Chun Wang's friend, Mr. Bao, revealed before the mission started that Chun Wang did not make any Bitcoin private key backups and stated that if he encountered danger during the mission, any Bitcoin he held would be considered permanently destroyed.

Flying to Mars

Chun Wang's space dream did not conclude with the successful landing of Fram2, but is still being further upgraded.

Returning to the initial story, just before SpaceX tested the launch of the latest generation Starship, SpaceX officially announced two of Chun Wang's subsequent space plans during a live stream — a week-long manned lunar flyby mission and, for the first time in human history, a full two-year manned interstellar Mars aviation mission.

During the live connection with SpaceX, Chun Wang was standing in the strong winds on Bouvet Island at 54°26′S, 3°24′E, which is located in the South Atlantic, near Antarctica, a Norwegian overseas territory (Norwegian Antarctic Territory) and outside the land frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.

On Chun Wang's personal X homepage, he detailed his travel progress. As of the post, the current progress is: “Checked in 60% of the territory on 1 celestial body (150 / 249), to be continued...”

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。