In brief
- Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, one of the first Bitcoin mining pools, will command SpaceX’s first private crewed Mars mission.
- SpaceX has not announced a launch date; Starship has not yet reached orbit or carried astronauts to space.
- Before Mars, Wang will join a separate Starship flight around the moon.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has tapped Chun Wang, co-founder of F2Pool, one of the first Bitcoin mining pools in China, to command the first private crewed mission to Mars. The company gave no launch date.
The announcement came during a livestream of the now scrubbed Starship V3 launch on Thursday, minutes before that launch attempt was scheduled to take place.
“A lot of people [are] talking about the whole Mars to be like we’re going to fly to Mars, we’re going to land on Mars, we’re going to build [a] city on Mars,” Wang said in a recorded video from the remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic. “But let’s get it started with a flyby.”
Wang already has one spaceflight on his record. Last year, Wang funded and commanded Fram2, a three-day polar orbit mission aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon, where he and three crewmates were the first four people to fly over Earth’s poles.
“Space was great. I already read a lot about space all my life, and I just went there for verification,” Wang said during an interview at Bitcoin 2025. “So, don’t trust, verify. I verified space.”
Starship is SpaceX’s fully reusable super heavy-lift rocket, the largest and most powerful ever built, designed to carry crew and cargo to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
The round-trip journey to Mars is expected to take roughly two years, covering hundreds of millions of miles, with the actual flyby of the planet lasting just a few hours. According to SpaceX, prior to the Mars mission, Chun will participate in the first planned Starship commercial human spaceflight around the Moon.
Despite the time and length of the interstellar trips, Wang said he isn’t concerned.
“I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff through landing, so I think I’m going to enjoy the trip,” he said.
Wang’s future Mars mission ties into Musk’s broader ambitions towards establishing a human colony on Mars, predicting that humans would live on the red planet within 20 years.
“Mars will no longer become a distant dream,” Wang said. “It will become a reality.”
However, with Starship yet to reach orbit, the timetable for Mars is an open question. In April 2025, Musk said SpaceX planned to launch an uncrewed Starship to Mars by the end of 2026, carrying Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robots, with human landings as early as 2029.
The current political landscape in the United States has helped fuel the push into deep space. During his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump called a Mars mission part of America’s “manifest destiny.”
“We will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars,” Trump said.
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