SpaceX has been wildly successful in just about every one of its efforts. The company was the first to make reusable rocket technology both safe and reliable, and it’s proven that by launching the same rockets over and over and over again. The company’s Starlink internet service is growing rapidly, and while it’s still in its beta state, it looks like an incredibly promising start to a service that could provide high-speed data access to countless people in areas where it wouldn’t otherwise be available. It’s even making steading progress on its pie-in-the-sky Starship program, though that’s still in a very early state.

The company has proven to be good at almost everything… almost. It seems that the incredibly taxing efforts to catch the nosecone fairings from its Falcon 9 rockets before they hit the corrosive ocean water have come to an end. SpaceX spent many months honing its skills and slowly getting better at catching the nosecone halves so they could later be reused, but as anyone that watches SpaceX launches has noticed, it’s clearly given up on that front.

As SpaceXFleet explains, SpaceX’s fairing recovery program was ultimately successful, at least to a point. A total of 9 fairings were eventually caught by the company’s twin recovery ships, Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief, but that’s a pretty small number when you consider that nosecone recovery was being worked on for years.