Close but no cigar. Newton's third law, every action has an equal and opposite reaction, no need for a medium.A rocket pushes gases from inside it in one direction, and this pushes the rocket in the opposite direction.
Pushes gases from inside in one direction?
A rocket simply burns its fuel and does so by fuel being pushed one way from inside to push against atmosphere at the external and off your rocket goes.
A simple as that.
And how do you tell if water is level?
I can't help you if you don't know the answer to that.
Rockets are not aerodynamic other than minimising surface area to reach escape velocity from gravity.
Escape velocity from where?
Rockets are aerodynamic. They have to be or they simply do not balance.
I'm absolutely baffled you don't think any of this is true.
You're baffled because you go with rthe flow of mainstream. I once did until I questioned it, so It's hardly surprising.
Let me pose you a question. You ascend the eiffel tower. You then jump off. What force is it that will accelerate you to your inevitable death?
My dense mass against atmospheric pressure.
My dense mass is already displacing it's own amount of atmosphere. Every bit of atmosphere I'm within I'm displacing.
That displaced atmosphere has to go somewhere. It is added pressure back onto me, just like if I was in a swimming pool, I'd be displacing the water in that and that water I displaced would still be in that swimming pool, only the swimming pool would have a slight water raise or a pressure raise back onto me by my extra dense mass displacement of it, as well as the water already in the pool.
In atmosphere it's similar except atmosphere is more what you can call, springy, meaning we compress it more easily than water and that compression reacts to our displacement of that atmosphere.
We are basically crushed back down as we ascend into atmosphere. Our dense mass is always acted upon above as well as below and all around.
No gravity needed.