>>12590734There are a lot of big misunderstandings here. If I were you I would throw out everything and start from scratch.
Gravity is not the result of acceleration or orbiting, in fact it's quite the other way around. Bodies orbit each other *because* of gravity.
Before you understand general relativity, it's good to understand gravity classically, the way Newton understood it, first. Otherwise nothing will make sense.
Classically speaking, gravity is an attractive force between masses. Any two things with mass will attract each other. The bigger the mass, and the closer the objects, the stronger the force. That's why the earth, which is huge and nearby, exerts a noticeable force on you, while Jupiter, which is far away, does not, and your friend, who is relatively small, also does not.
Orbits come from this because gravitational forces of objects that are far away from each other always take the form of "central forces." In other words, a satellite near the earth will always feel a force pulling it towards the center of the earth. Central forces always result in rotational motion: think about the tension force that the wire exerts on the weight as a hammer thrower spins around, or the normal force that a loop-di-loop track exerts on a car zooming around it.
General relativity is a way of reconciling this description of gravity with the rules about space and time that must be true based on relativity. The method is to think of gravitational forces as the result of the effect that energy and mass have on relative distances and time intervals. GR is complicated and hard to explain, but it's maybe best understood by thinking about a few of its implications: we should see gravitational waves, light should be bent as it moves near a mass just like the path of an asteroid as it swings by a planet, and we need to make small corrections to calculations of orbital shapes and periods.
Also yes! Being in empty space is essentially the same as being in free fall.
