Gravity in space isn't actually weak. If you built a 250-mile-high tower into low Earth orbit, you wouldn't float at the top—you'd still feel 90% of your normal weight.
This is the exact altitude where the International Space Station operates, firmly within Earth's gravitational grip.
So why do astronauts float, and why do satellites not come crashing down? The answer is that they are actually falling. They are just moving sideways so incredibly fast that they keep missing the ground.
To understand how this works, imagine standing on a high mountain and throwing a baseball straight ahead. Gravity pulls the ball down, and it hits the dirt a few dozen feet away. If you throw it much faster, it travels further before landing.
Now imagine you have a cannon powerful enough to fire a cannonball horizontally at 17,500 miles per hour. As soon as the cannonball leaves the barrel, gravity begins pulling it downward. But because the Earth is round, the surface is curving away beneath it. At 17,500 miles per hour, the rate at which the cannonball falls downward perfectly matches the rate at which the Earth curves away.
The cannonball is in a constant state of free fall, but it never reaches the planet. This is exactly what an orbit is. Satellites are just projectiles fired sideways with enough velocity to ensure that as they drop toward Earth, the surface drops away at the exact same rate.
If a satellite in orbit suddenly stopped moving sideways, the illusion of zero gravity would instantly vanish. It would plummet straight down and burn up in the atmosphere, pulled by the exact same gravity that holds it in its orbital path.