Wang Chun, founder of major Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, has put crypto capital where his mouth is — buying a seat on SpaceX’s first crewed mission that will fly past the Moon, swing by Mars and return to Earth.
SpaceX revealed the two-year interplanetary flight on Thursday. Wang also secured a seat on a separate, weeklong lunar flight slated to launch before that Mars flyby. His motivation is blunt: he doesn’t trust that Mars will happen unless someone invests to keep it on the agenda.
“I have no confidence that Mars will still happen within our lifetime,” Wang wrote on X. “And I think I should do something about that.” In training for his previous SpaceX mission, he said, discussion even turned to how to tether down on Phobos — a reminder that the engineering challenges are real but surmountable as Starship hardware advances.
Wang isn’t new to putting money into space. In April he bankrolled and commanded Fram2, a four-person SpaceX flight that orbited over Earth’s poles and ran experiments including space-based X-rays and mushroom cultivation. The planned Mars flyby would be a far bolder step.
Why a crypto miner? Wang argues governments are likely to return humans to the Moon — driven by U.S.-China competition — but believes private capital will be crucial to keep Mars within reach. “I hope that by purchasing a flyby mission to Mars, SpaceX will have another reason not to forget about Mars,” he said. He also framed the mission as a public signal: “Mars is not just a point of light in a telescope. It is a real place, and humans can fly there and come back alive and come back healthy.”
Wang’s F2Pool, founded in 2013, remains a heavyweight in Bitcoin mining — mempool.space data pegs its share of the global mining market at about 11.85%, making it the world’s third-largest pool. Wang, a Chinese-born citizen of Malta, joins other tech founders who have shifted from financing space projects to actually flying on them — names like Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Jared Isaacman.
SpaceX’s long-term vision extends far beyond a single flyby: the company has publicly outlined plans to build a self-sustaining city on Mars that could one day hold more than a million people and require millions of tons of cargo. Preliminary research and exploratory cargo flights aren’t expected before 2028, underscoring that turning that vision into reality will take years and sizable resources — including, increasingly, private ones.
Featured image: SpaceX. Chart: TradingView.
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