Orbit is not about raw speed; it is about balance. A satellite that “stays up” is really in free fall, but its sideways velocity is tuned so that Earth’s surface curves away at the same rate it falls, producing a closed path instead of a plunge.
The odd part is this. Push it faster at the same height and you can lose the orbit. Newton’s law of gravitation supplies the inward pull, while the required centripetal force rises with the square of orbital speed. Once speed grows too high for that altitude, the geometry changes: the path stretches into an ellipse, then, if you keep adding energy, into an open hyperbola that never comes back.
So a satellite that is “too fast” for a circular track at low altitude does not just skim along more safely. It climbs. Orbital energy increases, the farthest point from Earth, the apogee, moves outward, and beyond a specific threshold known as escape velocity, gravity can no longer bend the trajectory into any bound curve. The craft stops falling around Earth and simply departs.
