The Atlas was first designed to be an Intercontinental ballistic missile, but as ICBM technology advanced and the Atlas was no longer considered cutting-edge, it found a new life, a life perhaps even more important to history: It was modified and used as a space launch vehicle for the last four manned missions of Project Mercury, the first U.S. manned space program, which included the first American, John Glenn, to orbit the earth.

When Lockheed-Martin purchased the Convair/General Dynamics Space Systems Division in 1993, they acquired the nation’s most reliable space launch vehicle, the Atlas, but did not have much use for the records of its earlier heritage. Lockheed-Martin eventually donated the records documenting the Atlas heritage to the San Diego Air & Space Museum. The records gained by SDASM constitute a potential historic national treasure.

In March of 2015 the San Diego Air and Space Museum received a two-year Federal grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) to process and catalog 165,000 of the collection's images, and digitize and place online 50,000 of them.