The Wonderful Lifetime of Chun Wang: From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut
On March 31, 2025, Chun Wang, co-founder of the historic Bitcoin mining pool f2pool, launched as commander of the Fram2 mission, the primary manned spacecraft to enter a polar orbit. The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience lifted off from Kennedy House Middle on a Falcon 9 rocket right into a 90-degree retrograde-inclined orbit that passes instantly over the North and South Poles. No earlier manned mission had achieved this trajectory; The earlier most 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 all his most memorable moments in house: “I do not keep in mind a lot from my time in house, however trying on the Earth spinning under, I saved considering: We’re flying so quick, how might we get again all the way down to the bottom? The space itself is not that huge, lower than 500 km, however what issues is the massive distinction in pace. It jogged my memory of what I discovered in regards to the uncertainty precept,” he added, referring to Heisenberg’s uncertainty precept. 1927 physics theorem, which states that there’s an inherent restrict to the precision with which sure pairs of bodily properties of a quantum particle could be recognized concurrently. Essentially 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 momentum is taken into account together with it. Each decide whether or not two objects can really ‘meet’. Right here, distance is not only the distinction in place vectors; it should even be thought-about together with velocity vectors.” The 2 objects he was most likely contemplating had been Earth and the Fram2 spacecraft he was on, each transferring at unbelievable speeds and will simply fail to land if it weren’t for the minds of nice engineers.
Wang led an all-civilian crew of first-time astronauts: rover commander Jannicke Mikkelsen, a Norwegian polar explorer and filmmaker, 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 none docking to the Worldwide House Station. The primary targets had been polar remark of the Earth and the execution of twenty-two analysis experiments.
House might have been Wang’s most excessive journey vacation spot, but it surely was removed from his first. Wang has a self-proclaimed mission to go to each territory on Earth, described in his X profile as “Doc my journey to each nation/territory on this planet following ISO 3166: 60% (150 of 249) on 1 planet/moon(s) performed and counting.” Up to now, it has greater than 1,153 totally different flights all over the world, averaging 36 a yr, together with many current visits to Antarctica and the polar areas.
Nevertheless, Wang was not all the time an avid traveler. Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang was 5 years outdated when his grandfather introduced house a world map that sparked a lifelong obsession with exploration, but it surely wasn’t till properly into maturity that he started touring the world, after constructing a legendary profession as one of many first Bitcoin miners and pool operators. Computer systems entered his life early: he heard about them at age seven and acquired his first 486 SX with MS-DOS at age 13. He discovered to code video games and planetary gravity simulations. School adopted by means of programming competitions, however he dropped out and not using a diploma and moved between software program jobs throughout China.
Bitcoin entered his world in Might 2011. Wang noticed two articles on Chinese language tech website Solidot and spent the evening studying the Bitcoin wiki. “Pushed by curiosity, I opened the wiki hyperlink on es.bitcoin.it and studied it for an evening. I lastly understood every part, and it was like the invention of the New World,” he wrote in his memoirs in 2015. He borrowed $40,000 from his father, mined on a MacBook at 800 khash/s, after which expanded with GPUs bought in Zhongguancun. Through the first two years, he personally extracted 7,700 $BTCproducing roughly 2,700 after vitality prices. He offered most of it in January 2013 for $11 to repay the mortgage.
The primary GPU mining rigs in China, the kind of setup Chun Wang used earlier than founding f2pool. (Credit score: official f2pool story)
In April 2013, Wang co-founded f2pool with Mao Shihang, recognized on-line as Discus Fish. They settled in Wenzhou. Wang coded the backend; Discus Fish managed operations. The group launched on Might 5 and shortly grew to manage a few third of the Bitcoin hashrate at its peak.
Up to now, f2pool has mined over 1.3 million $BTCgreater than 9 p.c of all blocks ever produced. It stays one of many largest and longest-running mining swimming pools in Bitcoin historical past. Through the block dimension wars of 2017, the pool performed a quiet however decisive position in supporting Bitcoin’s Nakamoto consensus. Wang later said: “Proof of labor is the structure of Bitcoin. Please respect mining and respect the miners. With out the assist of the miners, we’d not have activated SegWit and made the Lightning Community attainable.”
From 2014 to the early 2020s, Wang saved f2pool operating whereas navigating business adjustments, together with China’s mining crackdown in 2021 that pushed operations abroad. In 2017, he mentioned the subsequent period of proof-of-stake with Vitalik Buterin. That dialog led him to launch stack.fish in 2018, a non-custodial staking service that grew to become one of many largest validators on Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana and different networks. The transfer diversified its infrastructure enterprise into the broader crypto business, bringing its 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, buckled in for launch. (Credit score: SpaceX by way of house.com)
The subsequent frontier was house. Wang had proposed a non-public mission in polar orbit to SpaceX from 2023. He financed all the Fram2 flight himself by promoting Bitcoin. No sponsors or authorities assist. The staff skilled for eight months in simulators in California, performing high-gravity turns, zero-gravity flights, emergency drills and polar survival preparation.
The launch occurred on April 1, 2025 from the Kennedy House Middle. Wang ordered from the commander’s seat. “The journey to orbit was a lot smoother than I had anticipated. Other than the final minute earlier than SECO, I barely felt any G forces; it truthfully felt like simply one other flight,” he posted. Zero gravity was solely observed when he by accident dropped a small stuffed polar bear and it started to drift. The primary day introduced house movement illness for all the crew. “It felt totally different than movement illness in a automotive or at sea. You would nonetheless learn in your iPad with out making issues worse. However even a small sip of water might upset your abdomen.”
The journey to orbit was a lot smoother than I had anticipated. Other than the final minute earlier than SECO, I barely felt any G forces; truthfully, it felt like simply one other flight.
I had imagined that it might be like being in an elevator that all of a sudden goes down, however that feeling by no means got here… pic.twitter.com/h7YMyPY9ld
– Chun (@satofishi) April 2, 2025
On the second day, the nausea handed. “I felt fully refreshed. The hint of dizziness has disappeared.” They opened the dome over Antarctica. “Hi there, Antarctica. At 4 hundred and sixty kilometers up, it is simply pure white: no human exercise to be seen.” The crew carried out 22 experiments in three and a half days: the primary human X-ray in house, together with scans of palms with a hoop, mirroring the unique Roentgen The radiation knowledge confirmed that the South Atlantic anomaly, not the poles, delivered the best radiation dose. In reality, the polar orbit decreased the time in that space in comparison with the ISS trajectories, which was demonstrated in essentially the most notable discovery of the journey.
View of Antarctica from the Fram2 dome. (Credit score: Fram2 crew by way of House.com)
The splashdown occurred on April 4 off California. Wang shared radiation graphs in March 2026, confirming a lower-than-expected polar publicity. Full scientific papers on the experiments haven’t but been printed.
Since then, Wang has barely sat nonetheless, together with his SpaceX astronaut wings and NASA Johnson checkups behind him, he went straight again to touring. In March 2026, he arrived at Bouvet Island (his territory quantity 150 of 249 on his journey record) by boat and helicopter, and spent 201 hours on the ice earlier than heading to Cape City. He continues to log flights and replace his X account with images, graphs, and occasional insights into Bitcoin and Crypto expertise.
Helicopter departure from Bouvet Island, March 2026: Chun Wang’s one hundred and fiftieth territory. (Credit score: Chun Wang by way of X/@satofishi)
This put up The Wonderful Lifetime of Chun Wang: From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut first appeared in Bitcoin Journal and is written by Juan Galt.
