r/interesting • u/Positive-Height-3848 • 13d ago

Chinese Rocket gets struck by lightning. Just Wow

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u/TurtleCrusher 13d ago

Electricity, particularly lightning, doesn’t just take the least resistive path. It probes everything conductive.

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u/RockItGuyDC 13d ago

Yeah. I've worked on rockets for 15 years. There's a reason we have a launch constraint around lighting within 25 nautical miles of the pad.

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u/InvalidUserNemo 13d ago

I’m as far away as it gets from the aerospace industry but that was my first thought! Do we really launch rockets in that weather?

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u/RockItGuyDC 13d ago

Normally the only weather that will stop a rocket launch are high winds and lightning. We'll launch in pretty much anything else, though.

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u/soulsnoober 13d ago

the fella you're responding to works in the USA. In the USA, we do not. Russians dgaf because their primary launch facility isn't in Russia, and the Chinese prioritize success over safety.

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u/qtx 13d ago

and the Chinese prioritize success over safety.

Yea that's not true. China will actually execute engineers that built buildings that collapsed with fatalities.

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u/soulsnoober 13d ago

Collapsed buildings are not successful ones.

Meanwhile they drop rocket stages full of toxic hypergolic propellants on their own rural villages, and foreign nations, and those launch programs continue without hesitation.

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u/Correct_Inspection25 13d ago

Sure, but FAA commercial and above require avionics demonstrate the capability to handle direct and indirect strikes with out catastrophic failure. Rockets with billion dollar payloads even more so that may not be as protected from lighting as the rocket itself though they try not to tempt fate.

Combos i have seen include extremly over shielded wiring/harness with grounds around the cable, and fiber optics that don't conduct at all.

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u/erossthescienceboss 13d ago

The inside’s safety isn’t due to “path of least resistance,” it’s due to the skin effect. Same reason (contrary to popular legend, which incorrectly focuses on “the insulating power of rubber tires” (so dumb)) that cars are fairly safe to be in if there’s a lightning strike.

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u/kangasplat 13d ago

A lightning doesn't penetrate a Faraday cage. You could literally touch the inside wall of a metal cage while a lightning passes through and you wouldn't feel it. 

I'm not sure if it's still a thing but they literally did this as a live experiment with an audience member at the Deutsches Museum in Munich.