*sigh* I don't even know where to begin.
Let's begin with the fail in the OP.
1. I'll give the OP some credit - he mentioned Newton's first law.
That's about it. Oh wait... that says, "unless acted upon by an unbalanced force." It's not in the absence of an unbalanced force - gravity.
In the frame of reference of the rocket, when he let go of the rocket, it would appear that he was moving backward. However, in the frame of reference of the Earth, he would have been moving forward (but slowing down, until he came to a stop - in the Earth's frame of reference - then started, or rather continued accelerating toward the Earth.
Another fail: the OP mentioned something about gravity - if he were traveling directly away from the Earth at 4000 miles per hour, it would have taken ONE HOUR before gravity dropped to half its value on the surface of the earth. (Actually, just a hair under an hour. I clearly don't remember that scene from the movie taking one hour. Isaac Newton figured out hundreds of years ago that the Moon goes around the Earth due to the influence of gravity. Apparently, the OP thinks it's magic.
All your bickering and arguing over lift, shape of the airfoil, etc. This is all it takes - if Bernoulli's is sufficient to explain how a plane stays in the air, explain inverted flight.
Also, if you drop a bullet and fire a bullet at the same time, which will hit the ground first? (Assuming flat ground) Answer: the dropped bullet, by a tiny, tiny, tiny amount. Why? Because the Earth is spherical, dumbasses. If the Earth was flat, they'd hit at the same time. But the Earth isn't flat - the Earth curves slightly away from the straight line path in the direction the bullet is traveling; that is, the bullet that's fired has to fall a tiny tiny bit farther in the vertical direction before it hits the Earth. And, assuming a perfectly spherical Earth, and no air resistance, a bullet could be fired at a velocity sufficient to simply put it into orbit around the Earth, albeit in an orbit 1 meter above the surface.
Fired objects don't follow parabolic trajectories - again, that assumes a flat Earth. They follow elliptical trajectories. Parabolic approximations - damn good enough.