Chun Wang had never travelled beyond his hometown of Tianjen until he hit his early 20s but, two decades on, he is set to become the first Maltese citizen in space.

The 42-year-old Chinese-born crypto entrepreneur will take to the skies in late March, commanding a four-person space capsule as part of Elon Musk’s SpaceX programme.

The capsule will circle the earth from north to south, making them the first people in history to fly directly over earth’s polar regions.

Golden visa

Wang became a Maltese citizen in August 2023, purchasing citizenship through the controversial golden visa scheme five years after his first trip to Malta in 2018.

Describing Malta as “a great country”, Wang says he first applied for citizenship in 2020, a few months before first moving to Malta from South Korea.

Now on his 30th trip to the country (“every time I land here I feel happy,” he says), Wang says he was in Malta when he first reached out to SpaceX to discuss the possibility of buying a ticket to travel into space.

Wang eventually bought more than just a ticket, commissioning an entire four-person space flight, at a cost that experts estimate could top $55 million for each seat.

Around the world in 93 minutes

Named Fram2, after the ship used by Norwegian polar explorers at the turn of the 20th century, this will be the third-ever civilian-manned spaceflight, after 2021’s Inspiration4 and the Polaris Dawn mission late last year.

And this will be the first time that non-Americans participate in a civilian spaceflight, with Wang, the mission commander, joined by crewmates from Norway, Germany and Australia.

Wang says that the quartet have undergone two months of gruelling training at the SpaceX headquarters in California in preparation for the mission.

“It’s the same kind of training that NASA astronauts carry out,” Wang says.

Travelling in a small 10m3 spacecraft – “around the size of two SUVs put together”, Wang says – the four crew members will spend three and a half days circling the earth.

They plan to launch from SpaceX’s launch pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida (“the same one used by Apollo 11,” Wang says) sometime in late March although, as is frequently the case with space travel, the launch date could be postponed because of technical hitches.

Just over half an hour after launch, they will be in the South Pole, ready for their first trip around the globe.

Travelling at speeds of up to 7.8km per second, it will take 93 minutes to fully circle the earth, Wang explains.

“If conditions are good, we will circle the earth around 55 times,” he says. “That should take three and a half days but we can extend it to over five days, if we need to”. 

Chun Wang (third from left) and his space crew will circle the earth from north to south.

‘Pioneers of commercial space travel’

Fram2 will reportedly be studying the earth’s polar regions throughout its mission, taking the unusual route of circling the earth from one pole to another.

“Previous missions all took a route from east to west,” Wang says. “So we will be the first to fly over the north and south pole.”

But, for Wang, the mission’s value lies in what it means for the future of space travel.

Wang describes himself and his crewmates as “pioneers of commercial space travel”, saying that his goal is to “make space travel economically sustainable”.

“I always dreamt of flying into space, now I want to see people travel to Mars,” he says.

Chun Wang speaking to Times of Malta.

Bitcoin bonanza

But Wang didn’t always have the travel bug, spending the first two decades of his life in the Chinese city of Tianjen, never leaving the country until a visit to Nepal shortly after his 28th birthday.

“My parents don’t travel at all and I never travelled more than 150km from my home until I was in my early 20s,” he says.

Wang spent much of his 20s bouncing around software programming jobs in China, having dropped out of university, before discovering Bitcoin in 2011.

But things changed when he borrowed $40,000 from his father, a small business owner, which he invested in some of the cryptocurrency’s initial ventures.

“The first few months were a disaster,” Wang recalls. “The market crashed, and I was broke.”

Now I want to see people travel to Mars- Chun Wang

But, by 2013, Wang had struck gold, cashing out on some of his initial investments and co-founding one of China’s earliest Bitcoin mining platforms, F2Pool.

In just a few months, F2Pool had become arguably the world’s largest Bitcoin platform.

Other investments followed, including the launch of Stakefish, another crypto platform, in 2018.

Although Wang’s net worth remains undisclosed, some have estimated his Bitcoin assets at over $300m.

Today, Wang spends much of his time travelling, meticulously documenting each trip on X.

“I’ve travelled to 128 countries or independent territories so far” Wang says. “There lots more to go.