system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Alright... help me out. Why doesn't the Earth fall into the sun?

The answer I usually get is, "it IS falling, it just keeps missing because of its lateral momentum." I can KIND of understand that, but I need help getting past a sort of mental block, a part of my brain that insists something is wrong:

If I want to fly on Earth, I have to constantly be generating some downward thrust, because gravity is constantly pulling me down. Likewise, the sun is constantly pulling the Earth, but the Earth only has a limited amount of lateral momentum. Shouldn't that momentum get used up?

Another way of looking at my objection: oftentimes I've seen the effect of gravity likened to the dip in an imaginary sheet of rubber if you put a heavy object on it. Well, if you actually had a sheet of rubber and put a bowling ball on it to simulate the sun, and rolled a marble to simulate the Earth, they'd be no way to achieve orbit. Either you wouldn't give it enough force and the marble would spiral down and hit the bowling ball, or you'd give it too much force and it would roll past the bowling ball and not come back. I realize that there's (almost) no friction in space, but I feel like, if I did the above experiment with theoretical frictionless material, you still wouldn't be able to create stable orbit. Am I wrong?

EDIT: I accidentally a letter.
gpt
The key is that momentum doesn't get used up. There is no friction. Satellites, spacecraft, and the moon all use this same concept, they are simply moving so fast that they 'miss' the earth as they fall towards it. If they were going too fast, they would fly further away. Too slow and they'd eventually crash. It makes sense that there must exists some happy medium.

Your example with the marble, and with trying to fly through atmosphere all have friction in common. Space has little to no resistance, so momentum can carry you forever.