I couldn't figure out from the author's bio whether she's an incompetent professional or an aspiring amateur. Nichols has a big portfolio, but a lot seems self-published. But I didn't do an exhaustive audit. The bio pic shows a young person, so I'm leaning toward showing some mercy. Some.

In any case, context around the passage above reveals she's fundamentally confused about bandwidth versus c. Sure, a laser's easily a hundred times "faster" than radio, in bits per second. (You could say the same about a teletype compared to Morse.) The whole article was kind of a mess, in my opinion (and after a decade spent as a technical writer, I'll stand behind my opinion). I sensed a lot of copypasta, all that boiler plate about NASA's lunar plans and how to communicate in space. She circled the point twice before coming in for a landing.

Oh well. There are thousands of articles like that posted every day, and we should be grateful for what they get right. I don't think the article reached very many, and the vagueness of the claim, to those not in the know, probably means it'll do no lasting harm.

You could say the same about our grousing on an obscure internet forum ;-)