I imagine that sometimes things that are put into orbit and intended to stay there sometimes overshoot their mark and the earth just flies by leaving whatever it was in deep space.
Or maybe that never happens?
In: Technology
Not unless the engineers are really really bad at their math. To escape Earth’s gravity completely you need to go at ~11 km/s. A low-earth orbit insertion requires about 7-8ish km/s. Unless you accidentally design your rocket to have an extra 3-4 km/s delta-v (which is REALLY hard to do, even if you’re specifically trying to do it), your satellite is staying in orbit.
In short, it’s really hard to actually leave Earth’s gravity. It’s not something that just happens accidently.
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