approximately 10 pm est, I stood on my rear porch which faces north, looking north at the sky. I witnessed a meteor entering the atmosphere and thought it might be a remnant of the Perseid meteor shower. It was a few minutes later, as I looked west toward where the big dipper was in the northwest sky, and I saw a light which I thought to have been the International Space Station making it's way from the northwest toward the southeast.It started in the lowest portion of the "bucket" of the big dipper and followed fairly perpendicular with the two stars the would make the left side of the "bucket" of the dipper.I have stood in this same location many times and watched the space station traverse the night sky and am familiar with the sight and appearance. It was approximately the same size and coloration of the space station - a white-ish orb that does not blink nor does it vary in intensity of brightness. It started across the sky and in my following the trajectory, mistook it for traversing the sky when I realized that it was not crossing the sky but going straight up, as if leaving the atmosphere of the earth.This became clear to me when it didn't progress across the sky in the manner that the space station might, as it should have been getting closer to the northern part of the sky to exit into the south eastern part of the sky, it began to diminish in its brightness and size. It waned in visibility until it faded and disappeared completely just short of being in the northern section of the sky. I waited more than a few moments to see if it reappeared and it did not. I stood there for quite a few minutes to see if anything may have followed or appeared afterward, but nothing did.The entire event took more than a few minutes, which initially led me to think that it was the ISS I was watching, but when it didn't follow a similar flight trajectory, I knew that this was not the space station.