The third rocket, a 16-foot Orion carrying scientific instruments, was parked horizontally and simply shot forward some 300 feet into the Atlantic.

The total value of the destroyed rockets, all operated by solid fuel, was estimated at less than $50,000 by NASA. There were no injuries to workers and no damage to the pad, a NASA spokesman said. Surge Sets Off Rocket Igniters

Robert Duffy, chief of the NASA operations division at Wallops Island, said it appeared that a lightning bolt struck close to the pad and induced enough current in the ''firing leads'' to set the rockets off. The firing leads are cables, leading from the blockhouse to the rockets, that are designed to carry a surge of current to igniters in the rockets, normally under computer control at the scheduled time of launching.

Mr. Duffy said there is ''no lightning protection'' on the pad at Wallops.

Three miles away at the N.O.A.A. weather station, three lightning bolts delivered ''the worst lightning strike the station has incurred in its 18-year history,'' according to Larry Heacock, director of satellite operations for the agency. One bolt hit an antenna that receives weather data from satellites. The other two bolts probably hit the ground, Mr. Heacock said.

The bolts overwhelmed the lightning rods, surge suppressors and grounding wires that were supposed to protect the station, preventing receipt of weather images from the GOES-West satellite that watches the western half of the nation for nine hours and blacking out the GOES-East images for five and one-half hours. Safeguards for Shuttle

Space officials insisted that lightning would almost certainly be unable to trigger an inadvertent launching of either the space shuttle or unmanned rockets at the Kennedy Space Center, which is heavily protected against such lightning storms. Robert Sieck, the shuttle launching director at Kennedy, said that a 75-foot tower intercepts lightning bolts and sends the current along two long steel cables into the ground some 1,000 feet away in opposite directions, thereby providing a ''cone of protection'' over the launching pad for the shuttle. The system has sustained more than 15 strikes or near-strikes over the past 12 years without problems, he said. ''We feel it's very reliable,'' he added.

James Ball, a NASA spokesman at Kennedy, said that NASA's primary unmanned rockets, the Delta and Atlas-Centaur, are launched from pads that also have protection against lightning. Both those rockets are liquid-fueled, he said, requiring that valves be turned and liquids mixed before takeoff, a feat that lies beyond the capability of lightning.

Kosta Tsipis, a weapon expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said that nuclear-tipped rockets embody so many ''electronic locks'' and other safety features that they are probably immune from the same kind of accident. ''I think they cannot simply be launched by a surge of current,'' he said. ''On the contrary, lightning would probably damage the electronics and make the rocket inoperative.''