If you have to travel by chemically-propelled rocket your only chance of escaping Earth's gravity well without falling back is to obtain an escape velocity of 11km/s (~40,000km/h) within a short time span before the fuels burn up. Anything that orbits Earth has a comparable speed, only directions will differ. Meaning "just so much dust" is a particulate stream that will hit you with a speed of many thousands of kilometers per hour. At that speed even the lightest insects hitting your windshield turn into non-trivial projectiles because of E=mv². It's not like idling through a cloud of dust, it's more like being subject to a very powerful sandblaster. That will wear off that pretty NASA logo pretty fast.