Chun Wang to Command SpaceX’s First Private Mars Flyby

SpaceX announced that Chun Wang, co-founder of China’s F2Pool, will serve as commander of the company’s first private crewed mission to Mars. The company described the flight as a round-trip flyby and said no launch date has been set; Starship has not yet reached orbit.

SpaceX added that Wang will first take part in a separate commercial Starship flight around the Moon. The company provided no timetable for either the lunar or Mars flights during the announcement, which came minutes before a scheduled Starship V3 launch attempt was scrubbed.

According to SpaceX, the Mars mission would take roughly two years and cover hundreds of millions of miles, with the actual Mars flyby lasting only a few hours. The current plan calls for a flyby rather than a landing.

Wang has previous commercial spaceflight experience. Last year he funded and commanded Fram2, a three-day polar-orbit mission aboard a Crew Dragon. He and three crewmates completed flights over Earth’s poles.

At Bitcoin 2025, Wang told attendees, ‘But let’s get it started with a flyby.’ In a recorded video from Bouvet Island he added, ‘So, don’t trust, verify. I verified space.’ He has said he expects to manage the long transit and that he enjoys watching map views on long flights.

Starship is SpaceX’s fully reusable super heavy-lift vehicle designed to carry crew and cargo to the Moon and Mars. The vehicle has not yet achieved orbit or carried astronauts. Elon Musk said in April 2025 that SpaceX planned an uncrewed Starship flight to Mars by the end of 2026 and suggested human landings could follow as early as 2029; those target dates remain contingent on further testing and development.

SpaceX has not released additional crew details, training schedules or passenger lists for the private Mars flight and said its timeline remains provisional while Starship completes the tests required to reach orbit and support human missions.

During his second inaugural address, President Donald Trump described a Mars mission as part of America’s ‘manifest destiny,’ saying the nation would ‘pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.’