A Russian rocket was filmed being hit by a bolt of lightning shortly after takeoff, video shared by the head of the national space agency showed on Monday.
The Soyuz rocket carrying a replacement navigation satellite took off from northern Russia when, 14 seconds later, lightning struck its nose cone and went straight through it. Officials said the jolt had no effect on the equipment and that the satellite reached its orbit without a hitch.
“Lightning is no obstacle for you,” Dmitry Rogozin, head of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, tweeted as he congratulated the scientists and crew on a successful launch.
“We’re all-weather forces,” Major General Nikolai Nestechuk, head of the Plesetsk Cosmodrome where the launch took place, was quoted as saying by the state-run TASS news agency.
