As a college student, mechanical engineering alum Joe Tanner (BSME 1973) decided to learn to fly. Little did he know at the time just how far the desire to explore the skies would take him.

“I like to say that I made three great professional decisions,” Tanner said. “One was to go to Illinois. The second was to join the Navy, and the third was to take a job as a pilot at NASA.”

Now fully retired, Tanner will be inducted into NASA’s Astronaut Hall of Fame on May 16, 2026, alongside fellow astronaut Tom Akers.

“It’s quite an honor,” he said. “Not everybody gets selected.”

Inductees are selected by a committee of Hall of Fame astronauts, former NASA officials, flight directors, historians, and journalists and must meet certain criteria including having made his or her first flight at least 15 years before induction and having orbited Earth at least once. Tanner and Akers will join 97 astronauts who preceded them as inductees. The ceremony will be held under the retired space shuttle Atlantis, currently on display at Kennedy Space Center.

For the mechanically inclined Danville native, studying engineering at Illinois was a natural choice. “I was also accepted at Michigan State University, but I just couldn’t justify going there when a great school was right next door,” he recalled. Tanner’s decision ran in the family—his father had also studied at the U of I and his older brother was a student athlete on the swim team. Tanner also swam with the team throughout college, specializing in short- and middle-distance freestyle, and served as the team captain during his junior and senior years.

“The swim team was my small group, and it was great,” he said, noting that the community he experienced both on the team and in the classroom became fond memories.

As a student, Tanner also took flying lessons in his father’s Cessna. “I started to become interested in flying and considered pursuing it as a short-term career in the military,” he said. “I figured I could be an engineer after that. It turned out that I never went back.”

Following his graduation, Tanner followed in his father’s and brother’s footsteps and enlisted in the Navy. He earned his Naval Aviator Wings in 1975 and was stationed in California, flying the A-7E Corsair II.

“We’d fly over the Sierra Nevadas to and from the bombing range,” he said of his time in California. “I’d spend the time looking out the canopy and rolling the wing, looking for places to go camping. I’d find a valley that looked pretty deserted, and then on my time off, I’d go up there to camp.”

He was assigned to a squadron that deployed on the USS Coral Sea and completed a cruise in 1977, following which he moved to Pensacola to instruct in the TA-4 Skyhawk.

“Moving to Pensacola was the best thing that happened to me because I met my wife,” he said.

In 1978, one of Tanner’s squadron mates was selected into the first space shuttle astronaut class. The selection turned out to be fortuitous for Tanner as well. “I gained first-hand knowledge from him on what the program was going to look like,” he recalled. “I was able to study some of the Shuttle systems and thought that being an astronaut might be something I could do when I finished active duty.”

Following active duty, Tanner spent a winter in Vail, Colorado so that he could learn to ski. His then-girlfriend, Martha, came to visit and left as his fiancée. The pair would later relocate to the state after their wedding. During this time, he had applied for the astronaut class of 1980 but didn’t receive an interview.

“NASA did offer me a job as an instructor pilot at the Johnson Space Center,” Tanner said, noting that the position would require a lot of time away from home. “I didn’t think it was fair to Martha to be gone for half the year. I actually turned the job down.”

Still, the allure of the astronaut program never dimmed. Tanner continued to fly each month with the Navy Reserve and worked odd jobs including as a supervisor in the base area of a ski resort as well as in construction and carpentry. He applied to the astronaut class of 1984 and, again, did not receive an interview. This time, however, he accepted the position as flight instructor, marking the start of his career at NASA.

Tanner continued applying to the astronaut program through 1990 without being selected. “I wasn’t going to apply at all in 1992, because I was getting older,” he said. “But then I thought, all they can do is say no.” His perseverance was rewarded. Selected to Group 14 of that class, he would go on to fly four missions on the Space Shuttle: STS (i.e., space transportation system)-66 (Atlantis), STS-82 (Discovery), STS-97 (Endeavour), and STS-115 (Atlantis). These missions focused on studying Earth’s atmosphere, servicing the Hubble Space Telescope, and two International Space Station assembly missions, respectively. Tanner completed seven extravehicular activities (EVAs), or spacewalks—two on the telescope and five on the space station.

“You’re leaving the vehicle, which is a relatively safe place to be, and entering an area that is hazardous to your health,” Tanner said of working in space. “You have to trust in your suit.”

Despite the risk, the opportunities to be out in space were unforgettable. “It was a tremendous experience,” he said. “The view was amazing.”

Tanner logged 1069 hours in space and, between flights, performed two tours supporting crew activities and launches and landings at the Kennedy Space Center. He supported shuttle missions from the ground as an office representative for the Mission Management Team and also served as a member of several problem resolution teams, specializing in EVAs. He retired from NASA in 2008 and became a teaching professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he taught a two-semester engineering projects course to master’s and PhD students for eight years and found joy in mentoring students.

“I tell students that they might become engineers, or they might go off and do something completely different,” he said. “The skills they learned in the engineering curriculum will help them wherever they go.”

He has experienced his own advice firsthand. “[Studying engineering] taught me a way to think about problems, approach solutions, and execute them,” he said. “That’s something you can use in the space program, in the military, or around the house.”