Richard Garriott de Cayeux currently serves as the President of the Explorers Club. He is a founding father of the videogame industry and the commercial spaceflight industry, a flown astronaut, and the first explorer to have explored pole to pole, orbited the Earth, and reached the deepest point in the Ocean.

Richard has been inducted into the computer gaming hall of fame and received the industry lifetime achievement award. He is credited with creating the now ubiquitous term “avatar” for one’s virtual self and the category of massively multiplayer games (MMORPGs). He authored the acclaimed Ultima Series and has built 3 leading gaming companies: Origin Systems (sold to Electronic Arts), Destination Games (sold to NCsoft) and Portalarium.

As a principal shaper of the commercial spaceflight industry, he cofounded Space Adventures, the first company to arrange space flights for private citizens and is the sixth private astronaut to live aboard the International Space Station. The son of a NASA astronaut, he became the first second-generation astronaut, served on NASA advisory Council, and has been a key leader in civilian and commercial space through institutions such as the Challenger Center for Science Education,  the XPRIZE Foundation, and Space Adventures.

Richard is an avid explorer, having traveled around the globe from the jungles of the Amazon to the South Pole, the deep seas of the Titanic and hydrothermal vents to orbiting the earth aboard the International Space Station, and most recently to Challenger Deep, the deepest point in our Oceans. He is married to Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux, a leading tech entrepreneur and investor, and they have two children, Kinga Shuilong & Ronin Phi."