July 24, 2025
Good long-form, ad-free journalism never gets old
Posted by WARREN PERLEY – Editor, BestStory.ca
Writing from Montreal
Since the launch of our 2025 Dingbat calendar last fall, BestStory.ca has changed its business model: as a result, we are planning to take down our paywall for now in order to make more of our contributors' ad-free journalism available to readers in the coming months.
The first tranche of five articles that we are now making available free of charge to readers includes the little-known story written in July 2014 by Rod Tennyson about how Canadian aerospace scientists saved the Apollo 13 astronauts from death during their moon mission in April 1970. READ THE STORY
With the first Artemis lunar launch expected next year with the objective of a crewed moon landing in 2027, there has been renewed public interest in the history of the space program and the role that scientists at the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies (UTIAS) played in saving the lives of the three American astronauts.
Who better to tell the story about the greatest rescue in space history than Prof. Roderick Tennyson, at that time (1970) a tenured professor at UTIAS and part of the team that behind the scenes engineered the rescue. His fascinating account was written in 2014 in collaboration with Daphne Lavers, a well-respected communications and technology writer/editor who did research and helped put together Rod’s unique and insightful memoir. It is as relevant today as it was when it was written 11 years ago.
In fact, Daphne recently shared with me that “interest in Apollo 13 has seemed to increase significantly over the last six months”, resulting in Rod being invited to give public lectures on the subject, as well as interviews for a documentary on Canadian participation in saving Apollo 13. So we are delighted to now make Rod’s story available in the free section of our site, where articles are listed chronologically. At the same time, we are making available (at no cost) four excellent stories written by Daphne, including her December 2012 warning about the dangers of space debris. READ THE STORY
This problem has only grown larger since then. The U.S. military says it is now tracking at least 20,000 objects larger than 10 cm with estimates that there could be 100 million pieces of space junk larger than 1 mm floating around. The total mass of space debris orbiting Earth is estimated to be 9,000 metric tons!
The other offerings from Daphne now in our free section include:
• a spiritual April 2012 ode to ‘cowboy poet’ Tom Lynch, described as the world’s oldest cowboy riding the tranquil trails of the Alberta badlands; READ THE STORY
• a delightful first-person tour of Rome conducted by Garth (goes by first name only), likely the most erudite Canadian in the world when it comes to sharing the artistic and historical bijoux of the Eternal City; READ THE STORY
• a heart-warming paean dedicated to writer/editor Natalie Edwards, who passed away on March 1, 2013, but whose notations memorialized a special friendship between the two women. READ THE STORY
I want to take this opportunity to thank Daphne for all her literary contributions to BestStory.ca over the years, as well as for her moral encouragement for our independent, ad-free journalism. Daphne’s professionalism and range of literary expertise has been a collaborative joy for me. With the removal of Daphne’s contributions from behind our paywall, I’m sure that more readers will now discover her talent!