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The future of space travel is pay to play, but that might not be a bad thing.
During the final 15 minutes counting down to SpaceX’s aborted Starship V3 mission on Thursday, Elon Musk’s space company revealed a fascinating tidbit: the man who’s going to lead SpaceX’s first crewed mission to Mars.
Spotted by Gizmodo, broadcasters on the company’s live feed announced that crypto billionaire Chun Wang has been tapped to lead humanity’s first interplanetary human flight.
At first glance, Wang might seem like an unlikely candidate for such a monumental task. A software developer who dropped out of college, Wang made his fortune by developing one of China’s first and most successful Bitcoin mining pools — striking it rich just before the Chinese government shut all of that crypto stuff down in 2021.
However, his resume includes another space flight, SpaceX’s April 2025 Fram2 mission, which he personally funded in order to secure a spot as mission leader. Though the media made a spectacle of that brief trip, Christopher Combs, associate dean of research at the University of Texas’ Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design described it as a “notch above a gimmick, but not exactly a groundbreaking milestone.”
The Mars trip, which would take up to two years, would be a vastly greater challenge on the billionaire’s mind and body — though Wang seems pretty gung-ho about it.
“I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff through landing, so I think I’m going to enjoy the trip,” Wang told viewers on Thursday.
It’s unknown who else will be making the Mars trip alongside Wang, and whether or not he’s funding it. Either way, the prospect that a billionaire could be willfully catapulting himself around 140 million miles from Earth left some critics buzzing on social media.
“This is the first time I have been 100 percent behind a SpaceX decision,” journalist David Perry wrote on Bluesky. “I hope they launch really soon.”
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