Radio frequency controls

On Channel 5 here in England last night was a program called 'moving
to Mars'. In the early part of the program was a brief section of a
team at NASA who were trying to work out how to get there.

One of the guys explained that for every kilogram of weight you have
to use more fuel, so one of the ways to save weight being proposed was
to do away with the ships control cables, and have little radio wave
devices instead.

Does anyone know of any web sites that deal with this? It was quite
new and surprising for me as I'd never heard of this way before, I'd
always assumed that they would used fiber optical cables.