This post-80s Tianjin Wei will be the first person to go to Mars
Author | Azuma, Daily Planet Daily
Original title: After leaving the 80s, Tianjin Wei will soon become the first person to go to Mars
Humans are finally about to embark on a journey to Mars, and the protagonist who is about to carry out this space mission that is destined to go down in human history is a native of Tianjin.
In the early morning of May 22, Beijing time, SpaceX, which is about to go public, made a big announcement — F2Pool co-founder and Fram2 mission commander Chun Wang (Chun Wang) will board Starship (Starship) to carry out the first batch of manned interplanetary missions to Mars! The mission is scheduled to fly deep into space for two years, fly past Mars (without landing) after leaving the Earth-Moon system, and finally return to Earth.
Prior to this mission, Wang Chun will also participate in the Starship's first commercial manned mission around the moon with Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito. The mission is expected to last one week and will fly about 200 km from the surface of the moon.
A travel freak from Tianjin
On the eve of the launch of the Farm2 mission on March 31, 2025, Wang Chun was interviewed by the space media “Spaceflight Now” and revealed many previously unknown growth stories during the interview.
Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang Chun was raised by his grandparents. He almost never left his hometown until he went to college in 2000.
But since he was very young, Wang Chun has had a keen interest in traveling, and he always fantasizes about traveling around the world: “In 1987, when I was 5 years old, my grandfather brought back a map of the world he had picked up while walking. That map instantly became my favorite toy and ignited my curiosity. What really caught my eye was the huge empty area at the bottom of the map — the polar region. From that moment on, I was fascinated by the mystery and excitement of these remote and unknown places.”
After leaving college, Wang Chun first went to work for a Norwegian software company in Beijing. Since then, his travel mileage has really skyrocketed — to save money, he often sleeps on his French colleague's couch or directly at his office, then commutes back to his home about 120 kilometers away on the weekend.
Wang Chun mentioned, “Despite having a full time job, in 2007 alone, I used the weekend to travel 75,900 kilometers by train. All in all, I spent two months in the train in 2007. I went straight to the train station every Friday after work, and didn't return to the office until next Monday morning.”
Over the next four years, Wang Chun further expanded his travel map. By train, he traveled to every province in China.
In 2010, Wang Chun began his first trip abroad — Nepal and then India. That trip took him to the southernmost tip of the Indian subcontinent. He boarded the 16317 Himsagar Express (Himsagar Express), the longest running train in India at the time, and continued his journey in the country from Kanyakumari to Kashmir.
That trip ended up costing him around $1000, which was all the savings he had at the time.
“During those years, I was very obsessed with infrastructure and transportation, especially railways. I meticulously recorded every train trip, accurate to the minute or even the second, and posted these records on online forums and message boards. Some people once called me the nickname 'One Thousand Times High Speed Rail Man' because I was counting the number of times I took the high-speed rail and was moving towards the goal of riding 1,000 times.”
Wang Chun revealed that as of March 20, 2025, he had ridden a total of 854 high-speed rail rides, but he has taken the civil aviation aircraft extremely close to 1,000 times.
Accumulation of wealth, ability, and resources stemming from cryptocurrencies
In addition to traveling, Wang Chun also showed a keen interest in various emerging technologies.
At age 7, Wang Chun first heard about computers, but it wasn't until he graduated from elementary school at age 13 that he had his first 486SX computer running MS-DOS 5.0.
Wang Chun mentioned, “In addition to playing games, I also used it to write many interesting programs, the earliest of which was a gravity simulator, which can intuitively show planetary movements in the solar system... At school, I participated in various programming contests, including the International Informatics Olympiad (IOI) and ACM-ICPC (International Student Programming Competition). Due to my outstanding performance in these contests, I did not take the college entrance examination, but was sent directly to college.”
In 2011, Wang Chun first heard about Bitcoin through the technology website Solidot, and on May 28 of that year, he bought his first Bitcoin at a unit price of $8.7.
At the same time, Wang Chun, a tech geek, also began experimenting with assembling mining rigs on his own to mine Bitcoin.
The story didn't go well at first. Wang Chun first collaborated with Wu Gang, the later founder of Binance, to rent a few private houses and build a relatively humble mine with dozens of units, and even borrowed the start-up capital from his own father... But even so, Wang Chun obtained 7,700 bitcoins through mining in two years. Of these, 4000 paid electricity bills and 660 were replaced with an iPhone (as a result, they were stolen at St. Petersburg subway station). Some of the remaining bitcoins were cleared by him at a price of 17 dollars in early 2013...
The turning point of the story took place in 2013. In April of that year, he and Mao Shixing, nicknamed “Kamiyu,” co-founded F2Pool (the “fish pond” known to the cryptocurrency community) in Wenzhou. Wang Chun, who has an introverted personality, is responsible for the back-end code, and the more extroverted Kamiyu is responsible for operation. It was the first Bitcoin mining pool in China, and later developed into one of the world's largest comprehensive mining pools.
In 2018, Wang Chun also founded a second company in Thailand, Stake.fish, a staking service provider focusing on POS networks, and fully deploying node staking services for PoS networks such as Ethereum, Cosmos, and Polygon.
The success of F2Pool and Stake.fish, along with the sharp rise in cryptocurrency prices, has accumulated huge personal wealth for Wang Chun — in 2025, Wang Chun revealed that in the past ten years or so, F2Pool has mined over 1.3 million bitcoins.
Space Dreamcatcher
The rapid growth in wealth enabled Wang Chun to fulfill his dream of traveling to bipolar regions as a child. In December 2021, Wang Chun successfully reached the South Pole; in July 2023, he reached the North Pole again.
However, after the dream came true, Wang Chun discovered that this alone was not enough... He had been traveling all his life, and he continued to advance towards unknown distances.
2006: He reached the Kazakh border to the west at 82° east longitude;
2011: He traveled to the southernmost tip of India and reached 8° north latitude in the south;
2012: He traveled to Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway and reached St. Petersburg at 60° north latitude and 30° east longitude;
2013: He traveled to Kamchatka and reached 160° east longitude in the east;
2016: He went to the US for the first time;
December 2021: He successfully reached the South Pole;
July 2023: He successfully reached the North Pole...
But now, there isn't a farther end on Earth, so where can we go?
Wang Chun quickly found the answer: “Since SpaceX began recycling Falcon 9 class 1 rockets, the commercial space industry has been advancing at an incredible speed. I'm once again seeing something new and exciting unfolding; it feels just like when I first heard about computers and first discovered Bitcoin.”
Wang Chun's choice was to fly to space. In 2023, Wang Chun proposed an extremely bold idea to SpaceX — hoping to buy a SpaceX “Crew Dragon” (Crew Dragon) mission wholly-owned by SpaceX and fly over the Earth's north and south poles.
Wang Chun's idea is that since humans entered space in 1961, the International Space Station (ISS) and almost all previous manned spacecraft (other than the Apollo lunar mission that flew from a distance) have not been able to fly over the Earth's north and south poles since the vast majority of rocket launches have been concentrated near the equator or in mid-latitudes. In other words, Earth's polar ice fields are a 60-year visual and scientific gap in the history of manned space in low-Earth orbit. Therefore, Wang Chun hopes to walk on a Polar Orbit (Polar Orbit) that no one has ever walked before, directly cross and overlook the Earth's two poles with an orbital inclination of 90 degrees.
Wang Chun named the mission “Fram2” (Fram2) to pay tribute to the legendary polar research vessel “Fram” (Fram), which has carried Norwegian explorers to the Arctic and Antarctic in history.
On April 1, 2025, a Falcon 9 rocket carrying the “Resilience” (Resilience) Dragon spacecraft took off on time from LC-39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. As Mission Commander (Mission Commander), Wang Chun led a pure civilian, all-African American crew (including Norwegian filmmakers, German robotics engineers, and Australian Arctic explorers) selected by him to officially embark on a space trip.
In a 90 degree polar orbit at 413 km apogee and 202 km perigee, the spacecraft orbits the Earth every 93 minutes, and it only takes 46 minutes to fly from the North Pole to the South Pole. During the three-and-a-half-day mission, Wang Chun and his crew completed a large number of extremely hard-core scientific research and visual captures — including observing the extremely rare high-altitude atmospheric phenomenon STEVE (enhanced heat emission rate), which is unique to Earth's high latitudes; taking the first space X-ray in human history in a microgravity environment; and the first time in human history that fungi can grow in a microgravity environment...
One detail worth mentioning is that before the mission began, Wang Chun's friend Grandpa Bao revealed that Wang Chun did not back up any Bitcoin private keys. He once said that if he was in danger during the mission, his Bitcoin holdings would be tantamount to permanent destruction.
Fly to Mars
Wang Chun's dream of space did not end with the successful launch of Fram2, but is still being further upgraded.
Back to the opening story, just before SpaceX tests the launch of the latest generation of starships, SpaceX officially announced Wang Chun's next two space plans during a live broadcast — a week-long manned mission around the moon and the first manned interplanetary mission to Mars in human history, which lasted two years.
When SpaceX livestreamed Wang Chun, he was standing in the wind at 54°26' south latitude and 3°24' east longitude. The island is located in the South Atlantic Ocean, close to Antarctica, is an overseas territory of Norway (Norwegian Antarctic Territory), and is outside the scope of land frozen by the Antarctic Treaty.
On Wang Chun's personal X website (you can go directly to niubi.com), Wang Chun followed up on his travel progress in detail. As of publication, the current progress is: “60% of the layout on 1 planet has been checked (150/249), and is yet to be continued...”
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