From Basement Bitcoin Mining To Commanding A Polar Orbit Spaceship: Chun Wang's Unbelievable Journey

On March 31, 2025, Chun Wang, co-founder of the historic Bitcoin mining pool f2pool, launched as mission commander of Fram2—the primary crewed spacecraft to enter a polar orbit. The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience lifted off from the Kennedy Area Middle on a Falcon 9 rocket right into a 90-degree retrograde inclination orbit passing instantly over the North and South Poles. No prior crewed mission had achieved this trajectory; the earlier highest inclination for people in orbit was 65 levels on the Soviet Vostok 6 flight in 1963.

In an unique interview with Bitcoin Journal, Wang shared one in every of his most memorable moments in area: “I don’t bear in mind a lot from my time in area, however gazing down on the Earth rotating under, I simply stored considering: we’re flying so quick, how might we presumably get again all the way down to the bottom? The gap itself isn’t really that nice, lower than 500 km, however the monumental distinction in velocity is what issues. It jogged my memory of what I realized concerning the uncertainty precept,” he added, referring to Heisenberg’s 1927 physics theorem, which states that there’s an inherent restrict to how exactly sure pairs of bodily properties of a quantum particle could be identified concurrently. Probably the most well-known pair is place (x) and momentum (p, which is mass instances velocity).

He continued, “Δx ⋅ Δp ≥ ℏ/2: place solely is smart when you think about momentum along with it. Each decide whether or not two objects can actually ‘meet.’ Right here, distance isn’t simply the distinction in place vectors; it have to be thought-about along with the rate vectors, too.” The 2 objects he was most likely contemplating had been Earth and the Fram2 spaceship he was aboard, each transferring at unbelievable speeds, and which might simply miss one another for touchdown if not for the minds of nice engineers. 

Wang led an all-civilian crew of first-time astronauts: car commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian filmmaker and polar explorer, pilot Rabea Rogge, a German robotics researcher, and mission specialist Eric Philips, an Australian polar explorer. The mission lasted three and a half days with no docking to the Worldwide Area Station. The first targets had been polar Earth remark and execution of twenty-two analysis experiments. 

Area could have been essentially the most excessive journey vacation spot for Wang, nevertheless it was removed from the primary. Wang is on a self-declared mission to go to each territory on earth, described on his X profile as “Documenting my journey to each nation/territory on this planet following ISO 3166: 60% (150 of 249) on 1 planet/moon(s) completed and counting.” So far, he boasts over 1153 completely different flights all over the world, averaging 36 a 12 months, together with many current visits to Antarctica and polar areas. 

Wang was not at all times such an avid traveler, nevertheless. Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang was 5 years previous when his grandfather introduced dwelling a world map that sparked a lifelong obsession with exploration, nevertheless it wasn’t properly into his maturity that he started touring the world, after constructing a legendary profession as an early Bitcoin miner and pool operator. Computer systems entered his life early: he heard about them at age seven and owned his first 486 SX operating MS-DOS by 13. He realized to code video games and planetary gravity simulations. College adopted by means of programming contests, however he dropped out with out a diploma and moved between software program jobs throughout China.

Bitcoin entered his world in Could 2011. Wang noticed two articles on the Chinese language tech web site Solidot and spent the evening studying the Bitcoin wiki. “Pushed by curiosity, I opened the wiki hyperlink on en.bitcoin.it and studied it for one evening. I lastly understood all the things, and it was like the invention of the New World,” he wrote in his 2015 memoirs. He borrowed $40,000 from his father, mined on a MacBook at 800 khash/s, then scaled up with GPUs purchased in Zhongguancun. Over the primary two years, he personally mined 7,700 BTC, netting roughly 2,700 after energy prices. He bought most in January 2013 at $11 to repay the mortgage.

Early GPU mining rigs in China, the form of setup Chun Wang used earlier than founding f2pool. (Credit score: f2pool official historical past)

In April 2013 Wang co-founded f2pool with Mao Shihang, identified on-line as Discus Fish. They arrange in Wenzhou. Wang coded the backend; Discus Fish dealt with operations. The pool launched on Could 5 and rapidly grew to command roughly one-third of Bitcoin’s hashrate at its peak. 

To this present day, f2pool mined over 1.3 million BTC, greater than 9 p.c of all blocks ever produced. It stays one of many largest and longest-running mining swimming pools in Bitcoin’s historical past. Through the 2017 block-size wars, the pool performed a quiet however decisive position supporting Bitcoin’s Nakamoto consensus. Wang later acknowledged: “Proof-of-work is the structure of Bitcoin. Please respect mining and respect the miners. With out miners’ assist, we wouldn’t have had SegWit activated, and we wouldn’t have made the Lightning Community doable.”

From 2014 by means of the early 2020s, Wang stored f2pool working whereas navigating business shifts, together with China’s 2021 mining crackdown that pushed operations offshore. In 2017, he mentioned the approaching proof-of-stake period with Vitalik Buterin. That dialog led him to launch stake.fish in 2018, a non-custodial staking service that turned one of many largest validators throughout Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana, and different networks. The transfer diversified his infrastructure enterprise throughout the broader crypto business, bringing his expertise as a big operator to the quickly remodeling crypto market.

To The Moon

Chun Wang (far proper) contained in the Crew Dragon capsule with the Fram2 crew, strapped in for launch. (Credit score: SpaceX through Area.com)

The subsequent frontier was area. Wang had pitched a non-public polar-orbit mission to SpaceX since 2023. He funded your entire Fram2 flight himself by promoting Bitcoin. No sponsors or authorities backing. The workforce skilled for eight months in California simulators, doing high-G spins, zero-G flights, emergency drills, and polar survival prep.

Launch got here on April 1, 2025, from Kennedy Area Middle. Wang commanded from the commander’s seat. “The trip to orbit was a lot smoother than I had anticipated. Other than the ultimate minute earlier than SECO, I barely felt any G-forces—it truthfully felt like simply one other flight,” he posted. Zero-g was solely seen when he loosened a small stuffed polar bear accidentally, and it began floating. Day one introduced area movement illness for your entire crew. “It felt completely different from movement illness in a automotive or at sea. You might nonetheless learn in your iPad with out making it worse. However even a small sip of water might upset your abdomen.”