They broke up before impact in the Indian Ocean (or Pacific Ocean in the case of direct-insertion launch trajectories), away from shipping lanes and were not recovered. [2 ]
Primarily used to launch payloads for the United States Department of Defense, NASA, and commercial customers, Atlas V is the longest-serving active rocket in the United States.
In the blog post “Reentry of orbital stages without thermal protection, Page 2”, http://exoscientist.blogspot.com/2025/04/reentry-of-orbital-stages-without.html , I discussed some possibilities of thermal protection for the SpaceX Starship.