Joe is a retired NASA astronaut and Navy pilot. He earned a mechanical engineering degree from the University of Illinois before joining the Navy to pursue his passion for flying. After earning his jet Naval Aviator Wings in 1975, he trained in the A7-E and cruised the Pacific on the aircraft carrier USS Coral Sea. Flying high performance jets fueled his long-held interest in human spaceflight. He eventually joined the NASA team at Johnson Space Center as a research pilot and flight instructor. He has logged more than 9000 flight hours in a variety of aircraft. Perhaps his favorite was the Shuttle Training Aircraft where he taught shuttle 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. During his sixteen-year career as an astronaut, he flew four missions on the space shuttle with one being to the Hubble Space Telescope and two to the International Space Station. He performed seven EVAs or spacewalks during his four missions totaling more than forty-six hours. He has logged 1069 hours in space.

After retiring from NASA, he worked as a Senior Instructor in the University of Colorado Boulder Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department where he taught a two-semester engineering projects course to students at the Masters and PhD levels. He is fully retired now and enjoying mountain living with his wife near Ridgway, Colorado. He enjoys hiking, climbing, skiing, building projects, working on old cars and does some consulting work on NASA and other government proposals. Joe is an active member of the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation.