From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut

The Superb 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 mission commander of Fram2—the primary crewed spacecraft to enter a polar orbit. The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience lifted off from the Kennedy Area Heart 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 house: “I don’t keep in mind a lot from my time in house, however gazing down on the Earth rotating beneath, I simply stored considering: we’re flying so quick, how might we probably get again all the way down to the bottom? The space itself isn’t truly that nice, lower than 500 km, however the monumental distinction in velocity is what issues. It jogged my memory of what I realized in regards to 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 might be identified concurrently. Essentially the most well-known pair is place (x) and momentum (p, which is mass occasions 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 of along with the speed vectors, too.” The 2 objects he was in all probability contemplating had been Earth and the Fram2 spaceship he was aboard, each shifting at unimaginable 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 goals had been polar Earth statement and execution of twenty-two analysis experiments.

Area could have been probably the most excessive journey vacation spot for Wang, however 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 the earth following ISO 3166: 60% (150 of 249) on 1 planet/moon(s) achieved and counting.” Up to now, he boasts over 1153 totally different flights around the globe, averaging 36 a yr, together with many latest visits to Antarctica and polar areas.

Wang was not all the time such an avid traveler, nonetheless. Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang was 5 years outdated when his grandfather introduced dwelling a world map that sparked a lifelong obsession with exploration, however it wasn’t effectively 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 working MS-DOS by 13. He realized to code video games and planetary gravity simulations. College adopted by way of programming contests, 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 the Chinese language tech web site Solidot and spent the night time studying the Bitcoin wiki. “Pushed by curiosity, I opened the wiki hyperlink on en.bitcoin.it and studied it for one night time. I lastly understood the whole lot, 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 type 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 Might 5 and shortly 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 % of all blocks ever produced. It stays one of many largest and longest-running mining swimming pools in Bitcoin’s historical past. In the course of 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’ help, we wouldn’t have had SegWit activated, and we wouldn’t have made the Lightning Community potential.”

From 2014 by way 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 grew to become 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 by way of Area.com)

The subsequent frontier was house. Wang had pitched a personal polar-orbit mission to SpaceX since 2023. He funded the complete Fram2 flight himself by promoting Bitcoin. No sponsors or authorities backing. The group 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 Heart. 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 actually felt like simply one other flight,” he posted. Zero-g was solely seen when he loosened a small stuffed polar bear by chance, and it began floating. Day one introduced house movement illness for the complete crew. “It felt totally 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.”

By day two, the nausea handed. “I felt fully refreshed. The hint of movement illness is all gone.” They opened the cupola over Antarctica. “Hi there, Antarctica. From 4 hundred sixty kilometers up, it’s solely pure white—no human exercise seen.” The crew ran 22 experiments in three-and-a-half days: the primary human X-ray in house, together with hand scans with a hoop, mirroring Roentgen’s 1895 unique X-ray, oyster mushroom development for Mars meals code “Mission MushVroom”, feminine hormone monitoring with urine strips, radiation monitoring, blood-flow restriction, cellular MRI, sleep monitoring, and extra. Radiation knowledge confirmed the South Atlantic Anomaly, not the poles, delivered the best radiation dose. The Polar orbit truly diminished time in that zone in contrast with ISS paths, which was famous by the spotlight discovery of the journey.

View of Antarctica from the Fram2 cupola. (Credit score: Fram2 crew by way of Area.com)

Splashdown occurred on April 4 off California. Wang shared radiation graphs in March 2026, confirming lower-than-expected polar publicity. Full scientific papers on the experiments haven’t but been printed.

Since then, Wang has hardly stayed nonetheless, along with his astronaut wings from SpaceX, and NASA Johnson checkups behind him, he went straight again to journey. In March 2026, he reached Bouvet Island—his one hundred and fiftieth territory out of 249 on his journey checklist — by way of ship and helicopter, spending 201 hours on the ice earlier than heading to Cape City. He continues logging flights and updating his X account with pictures, charts, and occasional Bitcoin and Crypto tech ideas.

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 Superb Lifetime of Chun Wang: From OG Bitcoin Miner to Astronaut first appeared on Bitcoin Journal and is written by Juan Galt.