Joe Tanner

Born January 21, 1950, in Danville, Illinois, Joe Tanner earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Illinois before joining the Navy to pursue his passion for flying.  After earning his Naval Aviator Wings in 1975, he trained in the A-7E Corsair II and cruised the Pacific on the USS Coral Sea.  Flying high performance jets fueled his long-held interest in human spaceflight, which led to his joining the NASA team as a research pilot and flight instructor at Johnson Space Center in 1984.  While he has logged more than 9,000 flight hours in a variety of aircraft, one of his favorites will always be the Shuttle Training Aircraft in which he taught astronaut pilots how to land the Space Shuttle.  

Though very happy flying and supporting missions for eight years, Joe never lost sight of his goal to be an astronaut himself.  After several applications, he was selected as a member of the 1992 astronaut class, Group 14.  During his sixteen-year career as an astronaut, he flew four missions on the Space Shuttle: STS-66 (Atlantis), STS-82 (Discovery), STS-97 (Endeavour), and STS-115 (Atlantis).  His first flight was ATLAS-3, the third mission in a series studying Earth’s atmosphere and the characteristics of the hole in the ozone layer.  His next flight was the second service mission to the Hubble Space Telescope where he performed two EVAs to upgrade and repair critical telescope components.  His last two flights were devoted to International Space Station assembly.  During these missions he led the EVA teams that installed two major truss segments containing half of the solar arrays currently on Station.  Joe performed seven EVAs during his career, totaling more than forty-six hours and logged 1069 hours in space.  Between flights, Joe performed two tours supporting crew activities and launches and landings at the Kennedy Space Center.  He also served as the EVA Branch Chief and worked on several special projects to include the Altair Lunar Lander.  When not in training for his own flights, he supported nearly every Shuttle mission as an Office representative to the Mission Management Team and was a member of several problem resolution teams, especially if an EVA was required.