Chun Wang, co-founder of the Bitcoin mining pool F2Pool, has been selected to participate in a SpaceX Starship mission that will venture beyond the Earth-Moon system, perform a flyby of Mars, and return to Earth. The journey is expected to take about two years, though no launch date has been confirmed.
Before the Mars flight, Wang is slated to join Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito on a commercial Starship mission orbiting the Moon. That week-long trip will bring the spacecraft within roughly 200 kilometers of the lunar surface, offering opportunities to test new technologies and procedures.
Wang brings prior spaceflight experience: he funded and commanded Fram2, the first crewed mission to fly over Earth’s polar regions, which launched in 2025. That mission carried out scientific experiments related to human health, space travel, polar auroras, and microgravity.
As a co-founder of F2Pool in 2013, Wang helped establish one of the largest Bitcoin mining pools. The pool currently holds about 107.2 exahashes per second, representing roughly 10% of the global Bitcoin mining hashrate, according to Hashrate Index data. F2Pool ranks behind only Foundry USA and AntPool.
The SpaceX plan marks a new connection between cryptocurrency wealth and ambitious space exploration. While the Mars mission remains in the planning stages—Starship is still undergoing testing, and multi-year private flights beyond the Moon pose significant challenges—Wang’s involvement gives the crypto industry a tangible link to humanity’s expansion beyond Earth orbit.