posted 08-17-2018 07:54 PM               

In 2008, Taiani recalled for NASA his experience during Apollo 11:

I worked 24 hours straight the day before liftoff. I had nothing to do once they got into transorbit, but I stayed up for another 17 hours waiting for the lunar landing to happen. I knew how much fuel they had, so I thought at any moment they were going to abort the mission. But there was a big sigh of relief for me, as well as mission control when we heard the words "touchdown."

I was so darn tired, but I stayed up anyway watching Armstrong and Aldrin take their first steps on the moon. Then, I finally fell asleep.

posted 08-22-2018 07:23 PM               

We first met around 1970/71 during the height of NASA's Apollo lunar landing program; Ang was in his 40's working at the Kennedy Space Center (KSC), and I was a junior high school student, or "the new kid on the block," after making the Florida Space Coast my family's new home in 1968.

A lot of folks don't know that Taiani served three years during World War II and retired as a Navy commander having served his country well.

Angelo started his space career in 1960 at the Cape as an aerospace technologist and test support engineer.

His first volunteer assignment for NASA, in addition to his regular duties at KSC,
was during the Apollo 12 launch in Nov. 1969.

After retiring from NASA in 1984, he continued as a Press/VIP escort for the shuttle and ELV programs. He was one of the primary NASA escorts to hundreds of space photographers and reporters while at KSC for more than two decades throughout the 1980-90s.

To many of us astrophilatelists, Ang was known as a devoted space cover and stamp collector. For many years, he had been a long-standing president of the Kennedy Space Center Philatelic Society (KSCPS), which first got underway during the late 1960s. The society was part of the KSC Athletic & Recreation Social Exchange (KARS) for the workers at KSC, CCAFS, and Patrick AFB in Florida.

He later operated his own space cover business, Space Coast Philately in Cocoa Beach, as the shuttle program was getting more underway during the mid/late 1980s. Not only just space philately, but Ang also had his hand in space pins, cloth patches, and decal stickers as a collector and distributor.

We would often visit together in our homes, see each other at the press sites and on other KSC locations, and just "talk space covers" all the time and worked together on all the shuttle missions and several other space cover/stamp projects.

During many of our conversations together, Ang would always be asking me, "How are the space covers coming along... and when can I pick up my covers?" Well, I think the last covers he got from me were for a SpaceX/Falcon 9 launch in 2017.

His dedicated enthusiasm and passion as a fellow space cover collector and friend would always have a special place in my heart...