What really helped me understand why you do not want to go up is the following thought experiment:
Imagine you are standing on Mt Everest (and the atmosphere has magically disappeared), and you would like to shoot a bullet once all the way around the earth, how would you have to fire it? It seems pretty intuitive that shooting it up into the air won't do the trick. If you want to shoot around the earth, you need to fire in parallel to the earths surface, with a sufficiently high muzzle velocity. And really an orbit is nothing else than a shot around the earth.
Imagine you are standing on Mt Everest (and the atmosphere has magically disappeared), and you would like to shoot a bullet once all the way around the earth, how would you have to fire it? It seems pretty intuitive that shooting it up into the air won't do the trick. If you want to shoot around the earth, you need to fire in parallel to the earths surface, with a sufficiently high muzzle velocity. And really an orbit is nothing else than a shot around the earth.