The BBC reports that Chinese scientists "have teleported a photon from the Gobi desert to a satellite orbiting five hundred kilometres above the earth." The language of the report is a little misleading, but it will have to do for now. Basically, for the first time ever, an object on earth was teleported to one in space (or, less dramatically, into earth's orbit).

The teleportation of the photon is done by quantum entanglement. Meaning, there was nothing attaching the photon on earth to the one in the satellite (meaning, there was really no space between them, and so it's not really a form of transporting). But because the particles where made at the same time under the same conditions, they have a deep, quantum, space-less connection. When the photon in the desert lab behaved in this and that way, its copy in the satellite, called Micius or Mozi (it entered orbit in August 2016), behaved in the exact same way. This kind of thing is more impressive than magic, than the many of miracles of the Bible.

Brain Greene's chapter on teleportation, "Teleportation in a Quantum World," in his well-known theoretical physics, cosmology, and string theory book The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality, describes teleporting in the popular imagination and its scientific implications in this way:

In conventional science fiction depictions, a teleporter (or, in Star Trek lingo, a transporter) scans an object to determine its detailed composition and sends the information to a distant location, where the object is reconstituted. Whether the object itself is “dematerialized,” its atoms and molecules being sent along with the blueprint for putting them back together, or whether atoms and molecules located at the receiving end are used to build an exact replica of the object, varies from one fictional incarnation to another. As we’ll see, the scientific approach to teleportation developed over the last decade is closer in spirit to the latter category, and this raises two essential questions. The first is a standard but thorny philosophical conundrum: When, if ever, should an exact replica be identified, called, considered, or treated as if it were the original? The second is the question of whether it’s possible, even in principle, to examine an object and determine its composition with complete accuracy so that we can draw up a perfect blueprint with which to reconstitute it. In a universe governed by the laws of classical physics, the answer to the second question would be yes. In principle, the attributes of every particle making up an object—each particle’s identity, position, velocity, and so on—could be measured with total precision, transmitted to a distant location, and used as an instruction manual for recreating the object. Doing this for an object composed of more than just a handful of elementary particles would be laughably beyond reach, but in a classical universe, the obstacle would be complexity, not physics.

There you have it. The point at which science fiction meets science.