Thank you very much folks, that explains it. I KNEW it was something simple. When you go up in orbit, you are, of COURSE, decelerated by gravity. DUH! You've put energy into the system and you now have more potential energy, but a lower velocity. Makes PERFECT sense. The bicycle analogy...
I'm confused by something very simple and stupid. When the mass of a satellite is tiny compared to the body being orbited, we can approximate orbital velocity as sqrt{(GM)/r}
Now its obvious that as r gets larger, the orbital velocity drops. Higher orbits are slower orbits. A...