Since the earliest days of spaceflight, humanity has sent machines and people skyward through an atmosphere that does not always yield peacefully. Lightning — ancient, indifferent, and immensely powerful — poses a question that engineers and meteorologists must answer before every launch: can a rocket survive the sky it must pass through? The answer, shaped by decades of hard-won experience from Apollo 12's harrowing 1969 ascent to a Chinese rocket's calm passage through a bolt in 2026, is that survival is possible but never guaranteed, and that the rocket itself may be the very thing that cal