Chapter 10. Selecting Parachutes and Streamers

As you know by now, parachutes are the most common way to recover a solid propellant model rocket. Chapter 12 will cover ways to use parachutes with water rockets. Streamers are often used with lighter rockets. But how can you tell when to use a streamer and when to use a parachute? When you use a parachute, how big should it be? That’s what this chapter is all about.

There are many ways to answer this question, and we’ll look at two of them. The first is to use tables or graphs to pick from common parachute sizes based on the weight and expected altitude of your rocket. That’s fast, easy, and works perfectly well for the vast majority of cases where we just want to pick a reasonable parachute for ...

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