Everyone's responses are spot-on. But I can understand that it still may not be intuitive to you. The difficulty is that we see pictures and videos of our sate

Everyone's responses are spot-on. But I can understand that it still may not be intuitive to you. The difficulty is that we see pictures and videos of our satellites and shuttles in orbit, and they look peaceful and serene. What's missing from those images and videos is a visceral feel that they are going over 17,000 mph. If they went less, they would leave orbit, and hit the Earth. Objects in orbit are not "outside" of Earth's gravity; they are not just up there, just floating in space. The reason they don't "fall to Earth" is that they are falling to Earth. Constantly. It's just that their horizontal speed relative to the Earth is so large that they are - literally - falling around the Earth.