Bob Richards

Robert "Bob" Richards was born in Toronto, Ontario, and brought SEDS to Canada in the spring of 1981, shortly after Peter Diamandis had founded the organization at MIT. The following year, Richards joined Diamandis and Todd Hawley at a conference at George Washington University to establish SEDS-USA as an international movement — a partnership that would define the next decade of his career and the founding of two more major institutions.

Richards's academic path was distinctively interdisciplinary: he studied aerospace and industrial engineering at Ryerson University (now Toronto Metropolitan University), physics and astronomy at the University of Toronto, and space science at Cornell University, where he worked as a special assistant to Carl Sagan. In 1985, he co-founded the Space Generation Foundation with Diamandis and Hawley, and in 1987 the trio founded the International Space University, where Richards served as founding Associate Administrator for Strategic Planning and chaired the board's administrative and strategic planning committees during ISU's critical first phase of development. He later became a founding trustee of Singularity University, the institution Diamandis would co-found with Ray Kurzweil in 2008.

Richards built a career bridging space science and commercial space entrepreneurship. As founding director of the Space Division at Optech Incorporated from 2002 to 2009, he led the company's lidar technology into orbit in 2004 and to the surface of Mars in 2007 aboard NASA's Phoenix Lander, contributing to the first-ever detection of falling Martian snow — technology that later flew on NASA's OSIRIS-REx asteroid sample-return mission as well. In 2007, Richards founded Odyssey Moon Limited, the first official competitor registered for the Google Lunar X PRIZE, and later founded Moon Express, which in 2016 achieved the first-ever U.S. federal authorization for a private mission to the Moon. He has since founded PlanetaryX, focused on space-enabled solutions to challenges facing people and the planet.

Richards has testified before the U.S. House and Senate on the Outer Space Treaty and regulatory reform for commercial space activity, and has addressed the United Nations on the peaceful use and development of space. He chairs the space commerce committee of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, is a member of the International Institute of Space Law, and has served on the board of the Space Foundation. His honors include the K.E. Tsiolkovsky Medal (Russia, 1995), the Space Frontier Foundation's "Vision to Reality" Award (1994), the Arthur C. Clarke Commendation (Sri Lanka, 1990), and the Aviation & Space Technology Laurel (1988). In 2005, ISU awarded him an honorary Doctorate of Space Achievement for his contributions to humanity's exploration and use of space. He is a contributing author to Blueprint for Space (Smithsonian Institution, 1992), Return to the Moon (Apogee Books, 2005), and The Farthest Shore (ISU Press, 2009).