Kicker: Hy-purr space

NICK EICHER, HOST: With apologies to the astronaut Neil Armstrong, it was one small twitch for Taters, and one giant leap for high-speed communications in space.

NASA: We got Taters? We got Taters. Yay. (laughter) That’s fantastic!

Taters is an orange tabby filmed fruitlessly trying to catch a laser. But forget about that. Taters is not important.

What’s important was how quickly NASA could transmit the ultra high definition video of Taters point to point … 19 million miles between them. That’s a long way. And when you have to communicate to deep space, speed matters.

It took only 101 seconds to transmit the whole video clip. For comparison the amount of data NASA was able to transmit in a day, the Magellan mission to Venus sent slightly less and that mission was four years.

And you thought dial-up internet was slow.

It’s The World and Everything in It.

WORLD Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of WORLD Radio programming is the audio record.