
Ever since humanity first tried to halt decay with Egyptian embalming, the desire to outlive time has haunted scholars. In this story a brilliant yet morbid scientist devises a plan far beyond any earthly tomb: to seal his own body inside a rocket and launch it into a permanent Earth orbit, turning himself into a man‑made satellite. The concept blends cold cosmic preservation with the age‑old yearning for eternal memory.
The narrative follows his meticulous calculations—radium fuel, orbital altitude, and the delicate balance between falling back to Earth and drifting into the void. As the launch proceeds, he confronts doubts about meteors, solar flares, and the possibility of his vessel becoming a wandering relic. Listeners are drawn into the tension between scientific ambition and the fragile hope that a single human could indeed linger unchanged while civilizations rise and fall beneath him.
Language
en
Duration
~52 minutes (50K characters)
Series
Professor Jameson
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2008-10-13
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1909–1988
A pioneering pulp-era science fiction writer, he is best remembered for the imaginative Professor Jameson stories, which helped shape early ideas about space travel, robots, and life beyond Earth. His fiction brought a big sense of wonder to magazine readers in the 1930s and beyond.
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