Mining on Mars? OG Bitcoin Miner Chun Wang Books SpaceX Starship Flyby

OG Bitcoin miner Chun Wang, who commanded SpaceX’s first human spaceflight over Earth’s poles last year, is set to go much farther next.

SpaceX said in a post on Thursday that Wang will fly aboard Starship’s first planned commercial human interplanetary mission, a two-year flight that would travel beyond the Earth-Moon system, make a flyby of Mars and return to Earth. Before that, Wang is expected to join Dennis and Akiko Tito on the first planned Starship commercial human spaceflight around the Moon, according to the company’s announcement.

The sequence would make Wang one of SpaceX’s most prominent private astronaut customers as the company tries to move its human spaceflight business beyond low-Earth orbit. His next mission around the Moon is planned as a week-long circumlunar flyby that would pass within 200 kilometers of the lunar surface, SpaceX said. The company framed that flight as a step toward validating Starship systems for longer-duration deep-space missions.

The Mars flyby, if carried out, would represent a major leap for private human spaceflight. Starship, SpaceX’s fully reusable rocket and spacecraft system, is still in its uncrewed test campaign and has not yet flown people. SpaceX scrubbed an attempted launch of its upgraded Starship Version 3 on May 21, with the company expected to try again as it works through a test program central to its Moon and Mars ambitions.

Wang, an early Bitcoin miner since 2011, is best known in the industry as a co-founder of F2Pool, one of the oldest Bitcoin mining pools, and StakeFish, a staking service provider. He became the first known Bitcoin holder to travel to space in April 2025, when he commanded Fram2, a privately funded SpaceX Dragon mission that became the first human spaceflight to orbit Earth over both polar regions.

That mission launched on March 31, 2025, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center aboard a Falcon 9 rocket and SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. The four-person crew included Wang, Norwegian cinematographer Jannicke Mikkelsen, German robotics researcher Rabea Rogge and Australian polar explorer Eric Philips. The Fram2 crew conducted 22 research experiments during the three-to-five-day free-flying mission, including work focused on the effects of microgravity on the human body.

The latest announcement places Wang in a small but expanding group of private customers helping fund and test the boundaries of commercial human spaceflight. Dennis Tito, who became the first paying space tourist in 2001 after flying to the International Space Station on a Russian Soyuz mission, and his wife Akiko Tito were first announced by SpaceX in 2022 as passengers for a Starship lunar flyby. At the time, SpaceX said the flight would carry up to a dozen people around the Moon without landing.