Atlas (familia) Atlas V

The Atlas V came out of the Air Force's evolved expendable launch vehicle programme and first flew on 21 August 2002. It broke with the family's signature feature: the paper-thin steel tanks that needed internal pressure to stay standing gave way to an aluminium structure with integral stiffening, stable even when empty. It is heavier, but it can be handled and shipped without special care.

The first stage, the common core booster, keeps the RD-180 engine introduced on the Atlas III. It can be augmented with up to five strap-on solid boosters and topped with a Centaur carrying one or two hydrogen engines, under fairings of two different diameters. Those combinations produce the three-digit configuration codes.

The RD-180 was always an uncomfortable dependency. In 2014 the United States Congress restricted its purchase and use, and study contracts went out to domestic engine makers that same year. The answer was to develop a new engine for a new rocket, with the engines already on order allowed to fly out their contracts.

In 2021 the operator announced that the Atlas V would retire once its remaining missions were flown, and production ended in 2024. Its replacement is a different vehicle with American engines and a new generation of Centaur.

Over two decades of service it has despatched planetary probes, observatories and military spaceplanes, along with Boeing's crew capsule in the fairingless configuration. The Atlas family, which started as a Cold War intercontinental missile, still flies here with barely two things in common with its ancestor: the name, and the Centaur stage bolted on top of it in the 1960s.

For the configuration with the five-metre fairing, five solid boosters and a single-engine Centaur, see the Atlas V 551 sheet.