Steve Robinson has become the first person to podcast from space (via). He did it from the Space Shuttle Discovery, whilst floating above Indonesia. Seemingly, the main thing this proves is that news travels remarkably slowly round the blogosphere – the story first appeared on the NASA site nearly eight months ago, and yet blogs that I read are only just starting to pick up on it. Especially with such a watched mission, one would have expected something like this to have spread round the web rather more quickly, but hey-ho, I guess that’s just not the way it happened this time.

In addition to listening to the podcast above, you can download it from NASA here, or read the transcript here. Perhaps the more amusing observation is that NASA’s podcast from somewhere off the planet sounds a damn sight better and more human than the podcast of this site, generated just across the pond in New Hampshire, USA.

In other podcasting news, the Pope’s got an iPod to help him keep up-to-date with the Vatican Radio podcast. It’s somewhat unclear which other podcasts he’ll be listening to, but then it’s also somewhat unclear what music he’ll be listening to. From the Newsblog:

The pontiff responded to receiving the gift by saying: “Computer technology is the future … I can’t wait to check out the Arctic Monkeys.”

OK, I confess: I made the last part of that quotation up. But the music player definitely brings the head of the Catholic Church closer to being “down with the kids”.

And so we’ve found it. Podcasting is the single point where religion and science meet back on the other side. The internet really does bring people together 😉