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ToggleI believe that even without private funding for lunar missions, humanity will eventually reach the moon, and likely very soon—as competition between the US and China intensifies, governments will make lunar bases a reality. But I'm not confident that Mars will be achieved in my generation. So I decided to do something myself.
This quote comes from Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, who explained in a lengthy post on the X platform on Friday why he "purchased" a seat on SpaceX's first interplanetary flyby mission. SpaceX officially announced the plan on Thursday: a Starship will embark on a two-year journey, flying past the moon, making a close flyby of Mars, and finally returning to Earth.
According to Wang Chun, he not only purchased a seat on this Mars flyby mission, but also booked a ticket for a commercial lunar flyby scheduled to depart even earlier. This entrepreneur, who previously funded and personally directed SpaceX's Fram2 polar mission, is clearly pushing his space ambitions from low Earth orbit to deep space.
I don't want to leave Mars to the next generation.
In a lengthy post on SpaceX, Wang Chun candidly shared his motivation: "I'd be happy to sit back and watch the lunar mission come true—because competition between governments will eventually make it happen. But Mars is different. I have no confidence that Mars will be realized in our lifetime. I hope that by purchasing this Mars flyby mission, I can give SpaceX another reason not to forget Mars. Because we really shouldn't leave Mars to the next generation."
These words reflect his deep anxiety about the pace of human space exploration. SpaceX's current official timeline indicates that Starship cargo flights will not launch to Mars until after 2028 at the earliest, for research, development, and exploration missions. And the ultimate goal—establishing a self-sufficient city on Mars—SpaceX estimates will require over one million people and millions of tons of supplies to achieve, a vision that is clearly still quite distant.
From Bitcoin mining pools to space commanders
Wang Chun's story is a perfect microcosm of the spillover influence of the cryptocurrency industry. In 2013, this Maltese-Chinese entrepreneur founded F2Pool in China, becoming one of the earliest Bitcoin mining pools in the country. To this day, F2Pool remains the world's third-largest mining pool, with a market share exceeding 11.85% .
In April 2025, Wang Chun made global headlines for the first time—his Fram2 mission, funded and commanded by SpaceX, successfully completed the first-ever manned spaceflight between the Earth's North and South Poles. During the mission, the four-person crew not only completed polar orbital flights but also conducted experiments such as X-ray imaging and mushroom cultivation in space. The crew members included German polar scientist Rabea Rogge, Norwegian photographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, and Australian Arctic explorer Eric Philips.
A New Space Race Driven by Crypto Wealth
Wang Chun's case is just a microcosm of the spillover of cryptocurrency wealth into space exploration. A growing number of tech entrepreneurs are using their wealth to fund and personally participate in space missions: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Virgin Group co-founder Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Jared Isaacman, founder of Shift4 Payments (who previously directed Inspiration4 and the Polaris missions), have all left their mark on this path.
However, Wang Chun's uniqueness lies in his Asian background—born in China and active on the international stage as a Maltese citizen—which makes him stand out in this space race dominated by Western tech giants. His journey, from Bitcoin mining pools to polar commanders to buyers of Mars flyby missions, outlines a distinctly different path of wealth transformation: the wealth created by cryptocurrencies is injecting a new, decentralized momentum into human space exploration.
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