Bitcoin Magazine
The Amazing Life 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 first crewed spacecraft to enter a polar orbit. The SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center on a Falcon 9 rocket into a 90-degree retrograde inclination orbit passing directly over the North and South Poles. No prior crewed mission had achieved this trajectory; the previous highest inclination for humans in orbit was 65 degrees on the Soviet Vostok 6 flight in 1963.
In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Wang shared one of his most memorable moments in space: “I don’t remember much from my time in space, but gazing down at the Earth rotating below, I just kept thinking: we’re flying so fast, how could we possibly get back down to the ground? The distance itself isn’t actually that great, less than 500 km, but the enormous difference in velocity is what matters. It reminded me of what I learned about the uncertainty principle,” he added, referring to Heisenberg’s 1927 physics theorem, which states that there is an inherent limit to how precisely certain pairs of physical properties of a quantum particle can be known simultaneously. The most famous pair is position (x) and momentum (p, which is mass times velocity).
He continued, “Δx ⋅ Δp ≥ ℏ/2: position only makes sense when you consider momentum together with it. Both determine whether two objects can really ‘meet.’ Here, distance isn’t just the difference in position vectors; it must be considered together with the velocity vectors, too.” The two objects he was probably considering were Earth and the Fram2 spaceship he was aboard, both moving at incredible speeds, and which could easily miss each other for landing if not for the minds of great engineers.
Wang led an all-civilian crew of first-time astronauts: vehicle 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 International Space Station. The primary objectives were polar Earth observation and execution of 22 research experiments.
Space may have been the most extreme travel destination for Wang, but it was far from the first. Wang is on a self-declared mission to visit every territory on earth, described on his X profile as “Documenting my travel to every country/territory in the world following ISO 3166: 60% (150 of 249) on 1 planet/moon(s) done and counting.” To date, he boasts over 1153 different flights around the world, averaging 36 a year, including many recent visits to Antarctica and polar regions.
Wang was not always such an avid traveler, however. Born in 1982 in Tianjin, China, Wang was five years old when his grandfather
