SpaceX's Crew Dragon “Endurance” capsule is seen during the Crew-3 mission for NASA on May 5, 2022.
POT
Private polar expeditions are reaching a new level: space.
Cryptocurrency speculator Chun Wang has purchased a multi-day flight from SpaceX for an undisclosed amount, the company announced Monday, with plans to lead the first crewed space mission into polar orbit, flying end-to-end above the Earth.
The mission, dubbed “Fram2” after the 19th-century polar expedition ship Fram, is planned for later this year. It will fly on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and use its thrice-flown Dragon capsule, named Endurance (a fitting coincidence, since three years ago a NASA crew named the spacecraft after explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s famous ship).
For the mission, Wang invited a trio of Arctic specialists to join him: Jannicke Mikkelsen, 38, a Norwegian filmmaker; Eric Philips, 62, an Australian explorer and guide; and Rabea Rogge, 28, a German researcher.
“I've been interested in space since I was very young… and for the first time, a private person can plan and design their own very personal mission,” Wang told CNBC.
Wang, 42, was born in Tianjin, China, but now hails from Malta, an island country in the Mediterranean, of which he became a citizen last year. Wang said he met his crewmates while living in Svalbard, the archipelago off the northern tip of Norway, and describes himself as a “nomadic,” having visited more than 100 countries in recent years.
While the cost of manned spaceflight has come down and is no longer the exclusive domain of superpower governments, a multi-day mission is still only accessible to very high-net-worth individuals.
SpaceX does not publicize the price of its crewed missions, although it does disclose the price it charges to launch satellites. NASA has previously disclosed that it pays about $55 million per seat to transport astronauts on the Dragon, meaning a crewed mission costs more than $200 million.
Wang confirmed that “I paid for this mission,” but declined to specify how much.
Aside from showcasing his travels around the world on social media, Wang has kept a low profile and his unspecified net worth appears to be mostly, if not entirely, tied to his cryptocurrency mining work.
On LinkedIn, Wang says he mined 7,700 bitcoins in two years, an amount that would be worth about $450 million in today’s prices. He also says he co-founded F2Pool, a self-described decentralized collective that helps generate cryptocurrency, and the organization says it has mined more than 1.3 million bitcoins in the past 11 years, an amount that would be worth more than $76 billion in today’s dollars.
Mikkelsen, Wang's neighbour in the Svalbard town of Longyearbyen, said she was surprised when Wang went from friend to future astronaut.
“I didn't believe Chun at all when he texted me out of the blue,” Mikkelsen told CNBC.
Wang said his proposal to SpaceX for the Fram2 mission came about after the historic private Inspiration4 flight in 2021.
Like Inspiration4, the spacecraft will have a “dome”-shaped window installed and will remain in orbit for three to five days. The Fram2 crew also plans to conduct a variety of research, including studying the upper atmosphere (especially observing “fragments of the aurora” above Earth, Mikkelsen said) as well as analyzing the effects of spaceflight on the human body.
The crew members began training with SpaceX this week, having done their own training in “extreme environments” in Alaska a month ago, and hope their flight will foster the idea that space is becoming more accessible. Mikkelsen said he hopes to do more than “film a documentary,” but to make “an immersive production, so you can also experience it as if you were in Dragon.”
“We're trying to open the door wider and make people feel that everyone can have their own very personal space mission,” Wang added.
