Portrait of Joseph Allen Courtesy of NASA

Joseph Allen is an American astronaut who was born on June 27, 1937 in Indiana. Before he became an astronaut, Allen was a physicist who taught at the University of Washington.

Allen became an astronaut in 1967. He has logged 314 hours in space during two missions. He has made two spacewalks.

In 1982, Allen flew on the STS-5 shuttle mission. He supervised the first launch of a satellite from a shuttle. In 1984, Allen took part in the first salvage mission in space history. Allen helped retrieve two broken satellites. During one of his spacewalks on this missions, Allen "carried" one of the weightless satellites over his head for an entire Earth orbit!