I’ve been on a Kerbal Space Program kick recently, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned from that game it’s that getting to space is hard. I’m not sure if you knew that. Basically, you gotta go really high up, and then you gotta go really fast sideways. You gotta go so fast that, even though you’re falling to the ground, you’re going so fast that you miss the ground.
It’s the going fast sideways part that’s tricky. The Earth is really big, so to miss the ground you have to go really, incredibly fast. In fact, about 80% of the Apollo rockets were designed to get the ship into orbit.