Meet Atlas V: The Semi Truck of the Space Industry That Carried Lucy To the Stars
A look at the most reliable rocket ever built
On October 16th, 2021, the Lucy Spacecraft began its 12 year journey to study the trojan asteroids of Jupiter. NASA has spent the last 6 years and $981 million developing and launching the Lucy spacecraft. So, who do you turn to when you need someone to accelerate that close to $1 billion scientific instrument to 67,000 mph so that it can travel nearly 4 billion miles before reaching its destination? If it were my money, I would look to the company with a rocket that has a 100% success rate.
In its 15 years of service, the Atlas V has flown 88 missions that have gone off without a hitch, with the successful launch of Lucy this morning making 89. As a standalone machine, the Atlas V is unparalleled in it’s reliability. However, this workhorse also comes with a long heritage of the Atlas launch vehicle family dating back to the very beginning of the space race. In fact, it was an Atlas LV-3B rocket that first lofted John Glenn into orbit on the Friendship 7 mission.
The Atlas V is not only known for it’s reliability, but for it’s flexibility as well. United Launch Alliance offers the Atlas V in 11 different configurations. Four configurations in the 400 series, six the 500 series and one configuration for the manned Starliner missions to the ISS. Today, the Lucy mission was launched in the 401 configuration. 4 being in reference to the size of the rockets fairing being 4 meters in diameter, 0 for the number of solid rocket boosters and 1 for the number of Centaur engines on the vehicles second stage.
Now, if you’re wanting to launch your spacecraft on an Atlas V, don’t get your hopes up. ULA has officially sold their last Atlas V rocket. There are a total of 27 launches left, after which, ULA will hopefully have completed development of their next generation Vulcan launch vehicle. The Vulcan rocket is expected to fill the gap left by both the Atlas and Delta launch vehicles. However, like many other space industry programs, the Vulcan has already faced many delays and is not expected to launch until 2022.
