<font color="orange">"OwenAnder: ...could you technically leave Earth at 1 mph as long as you never stopped gaining altitude?"</font><br /><br />You've given a velocity, but no acceleration or direction. From the way your question is stated, presumably your 1MPH is 'straight up' as measured from the launch site. Given that the velocity is negligible for the purposes of orbital calculations, I'll assume so. <br /><br />This style of question is part of the 'orbit means altitude' school of misthought. Rockets intended to place something in orbit are not designed to launch spacecraft by making them go *high*, but to make them go *fast* (i.e. 'orbit means <b>velocity</b>'). The exception is sounding rockets which are intended to go up... then come right back down.<br /><br />If it were possible to 'launch' something to orbital altitudes in the fashion you describe (100km to ~32000km), once it was *at* the intended altitude, if the mysterious force providing constant velocity were to cease -- the craft would simply fall back to earth from gravitational acceleration. It would not have the orbital velocity to counteract the pull of the Earth.<br /><br />If we assume the force holding it up never goes away, but simply stops the 1MPH velocity and 'holds it' indefinitely at the desired altitude, then there's a second problem. Everything *else* at the given altitude will be moving at the proper orbital velocity -- several kilometers per second. By contrast, the 'spacecraft' will be moving with the same velocity/rotation it had at the surface of the earth. This will vary depending on how close to the equator you were at launch, but will be something less than 900MPH. By the time you get to orbital altitudes, 900MPH will not be fast enough to circle the earth in 24-hours, and so the Earth will spin beneath the craft (the higher the altitude, the faster the retrograde progression of the craft).<br /><br />In short -- such a scheme does not have any real value in launch