A billionaire who led a private spaceflight in 2025 on a SpaceX Dragon that launched from Florida has been tapped to lead a future mission to Mars.
Ahead of SpaceX’s most recent test flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company unveiled plans for a human-led voyage to the red planet. It’s just not clear when.
The announcement comes as SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk founded in 2002, prepares the world’s largest rocket for NASA moon landings.
In February, Musk also revealed that SpaceX had plans of building its own city on the moon. While the news represented a shift in Musk’s long-held dream of colonizing Mars, it did not mean the tech mogul had abandoned that interplanetary objective entirely.
Here’s everything to know about SpaceX’s plans for a crewed mission to Mars, as well as the private astronaut who could lead it.
SpaceX taps cryptocurrency billionaire to lead mission to Mars
Chun Wang, a cryptocurrency businessman, is financing the mission and serving as mission commander.
SpaceX announced in May that it is planning a two-year mission that aims to send a crew of private astronauts around Mars without landing before returning to Earth. The voyage would be the first crewed interplanetary spaceflight ever.
Before the mission, SpaceX plans to conduct a separate flyby of the moon – not unlike NASA’s Artemis II mission in April that sent four astronauts around the moon and back. But while the Artemis II mission sent its crew on an Orion capsule no closer than about 4,067 miles above the lunar surface, SpaceX aims to send a private crew much closer: less than 125 miles from the ground.
SpaceX made the announcement May 21 on its website a day before the next-generation prototype of its Starship rocket made its debut at its Starbase headquarters in South Texas. The 407-foot spacecraft, which was making its 12th overall flight test since 2023, would be used in both missions, according to SpaceX.
SpaceX named cryptocurrency billionaire Chun Wang as the leader of both the moon and Mars missions. Wang also appeared in a video with SpaceX communications manager Dan Huot while speaking from the remote Bouvet Island in the South Atlantic Ocean.
“Mars will no longer become a distant place, it will become a reality,” Wang told Huot in the pre-recorded video, played during a live webcast of a Starship launch attempt that was ultimately scrubbed. “It will light the fire, it will ignite the imagination and it will build momentum.”
Chun Wang led Fram2 mission launched in 2025 in Florida
If Wang’s name sounds familiar, it’s because in April 2025, he led a crew of private astronauts on a mission known as Fram2 that took them on a trailblazing four-day mission around Earth’s poles.
Named after a Norwegian ship that traversed the North and South poles at the turn of the 20th Century, Fram2 sought to pay homage to its namesake with a pioneering polar voyage of its own.
The mission launched April 1, 2025, from the Kennedy Space Center near Cape Canaveral, Florida, with a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket propelling Wang and his crew to space aboard a Dragon crew capsule. The private spacefarers then became the first humans to fly in orbit over both the North and South poles before a water landing off the coast of California.
Wang is a Malta-based entrepreneur born in China who built his fortune with Bitcoin mining pools, financed the mission with an undisclosed sum.
When will SpaceX’s interplanetary mission launch?
SpaceX did not announce a timeframe for either the lunar or Mars flyby missions.
Starship, however, has yet to reach orbit on any of its 12 test flights so far. If all goes to plan, the new design of the rocket – known as Version 3 or V3 – will be the one to reach orbit and demonstrate the capability of refueling midflight to enable missions deeper into space.
SpaceX is also under contract with NASA to develop a lunar lander configuration of Starship’s upper stage for upcoming Artemis moon landings. NASA wants to potentially test the lunar lander in Earth orbit during Artemis III in 2027 before a landing is attempted during Artemis IV, targeted for 2028.
Elon Musk has long dreamed of sending humans to Mars
Musk, who has long dreamed of “making life interplanetary” by colonizing Mars, has in the past made large promises about Starship reaching our planetary neighbor.
Previously, Starship was intended to launch without a crew by the end of 2026 to coincide with an orbital alignment around the sun that would shorten the journey between Earth and Mars. That almost certainly won’t happen, but SpaceX is now instead working toward building a “self-growing” city on the moon in the next decade.
Could SpaceX Mars mission launch from Florida?
Just as unclear as the date when SpaceX’s human-led Mars mission could launch is where the launch could take place.
As of now, Starship has only gotten off the ground from SpaceX’s Starbase company town and headquarters in South Texas. The rocket company, though, has been hard at work to expand Starship operations to Florida’s Space Coast.
Florida’s first landmark Starship launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center could take flight in 2026 in late summer or early fall, according to the U.S. Space Force.
Plans to get the rocket off the ground from the Sunshine State come as SpaceX continues to ready longterm launch and landing operations at not only Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A, but Launch Complex 37 at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Eric Lagatta is the Space Connect reporter for the USA TODAY Network. Reach him at elagatta@usatodayco.com. Subscribe to the free Florida TODAY newsletter.
This article originally appeared on Florida Today: Crypto billionaire from Florida SpaceX mission could soon head to Mars