Crypto Investor Works on a Plan to Ride SpaceX Starship Around Mars

Chun Wang is a cryptocurrency billionaire with roughly $300 million to his name, a Dragon spacecraft flight in his recent past, and a standing ambition to loop around Mars in a Starship before the decade is out. He announced this on a video feed from Bouvet Island — the world's most remote island, a frozen speck in the South Atlantic with no permanent inhabitants — while SpaceX's newest Starship sat on the launch pad and did not launch. The rocket's final scrub happened at T-minus 40 seconds, according to SpacePolicyOnline. The company is targeting May 22 for a retry.

The timing reads as either cosmically ironic or deliberately theatrical: Wang used a failed launch webcast to announce he had bought a seat on a Mars mission that does not yet have a firm departure date. Universe Today called it a plan to ride Starship around Mars, which is accurate and misses the point. The language of cosmic ambition has become the vehicle for what is essentially a very expensive tourism transaction — and that transaction is being used to pre-sell Mars to people who have not yet seen Starship complete a single Earth orbit.

Wang, 42, was born in China and became a citizen of Malta in 2023. He co-founded F2Pool and Stakefish, two cryptocurrency ventures that together represent a meaningful share of Ethereum's staking infrastructure. Last year he commanded Fram2, a privately funded SpaceX Dragon mission that carried him and three crew members into polar orbit for three and a half days — a trip he described as the furthest north any human had traveled since the Apollo program. He spoke from Bouvet Island, which is not a metaphor but a real place: 19 square kilometers of volcanic rock, permanently staffed by no one, accessible only by sea or helicopter. It is the kind of location that makes a backdrop look either apocalyptic or transcendent depending on what you are trying to sell.

The Mars plan involves two stages. The first is a planned Starship circumlunar flight, a week-long trajectory that passes within 200 kilometers of the Moon's surface, per SpaceX's published mission parameters. Wang would be joined on that leg by Dennis Tito and Akiko Tito. Dennis Tito, 85, is the man who became the first American space tourist in 2001 when he rode a Russian Soyuz craft to the International Space Station for six days. He and his wife bought their Starship tickets in 2022. That is four years of waiting, with no firm launch date yet confirmed. The second stage — Mars — would be a roughly two-year round trip, SpaceX's mission description says the Mars leg would be roughly two years round trip. The company has said it plans to fly within 200 kilometers of the Moon's surface before attempting the longer trajectory.

What SpaceX has not said is what Wang actually paid, what the refund policy is if the mission slips again, or whether his participation is a binding contract or a reservation in the same sense that Tito's is. The webcast announcement did not include those details. Neither did the subsequent coverage. Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese billionaire who originally booked a Starship moon mission and then canceled it in 2024 citing schedule uncertainty, is the obvious cautionary data point. He spent years and presumably significant money before concluding that the timeline was not trustworthy enough to commit to. Wang appears to have reached the opposite conclusion.

The announcement worth examining is the one wrapped in exploration language. The visual of a man announcing his interplanetary ambitions from the most remote habitable location on Earth does work that the underlying transaction does not support. Starship has not completed an orbital flight. The circumlunar mission has no firm date. The Mars trajectory is described as a plan, not a contract. Multiple outlets framed the announcement as news that a Mars mission had been booked. It had not. A wealthy person expressed an intention to join one when it exists.

Dennis Tito has been waiting four years. Maezawa walked away. The rocket is not finished flying. None of this is disqualifying — deep-space tourism will require early adopters willing to accept uncertainty, and the money they bring funds development that eventually lowers costs for everyone. That argument is real and it is worth making honestly. What it is not is inspiration. It is a venture capital round in a spacesuit.

The next data point is May 22, when SpaceX plans to retry the Starship V3 launch that scrubbed at T-minus 40 seconds on May 21. The cause, per Elon Musk's post on X: a hydraulic pin holding the tower arm in place did not retract. The vehicle's water deluge system, the Quick Disconnect mechanism, and the underlying mechanical tolerances of a rocket that is still being qualified for flight all contributed to the hold. SpaceX will try again. The question is not whether Starship will eventually fly. It probably will. The question is whether the people who signed up to go to Mars before the rocket was done flying understand what they bought — and whether the language of exploration is obscuring a very ordinary commercial arrangement in the world of extremely expensive experiences.