Rocket Building: Parachutes

So today we finished making our parachute. The parachute was 24 inches in diameter and there were eight strings attached to it. We folded it so it could unravel without getting the strings tangled. During our first launch, the parachute didn't deploy. On the second launch, the parachute deployed beautifully but the nose cone fell off too early. After that the parachute didn't deploy until our fifth or sixth launch but it didn't really matter cause it was about one or two feet above the ground. The launches after that were stupidly lame and the nose cone didn't come off or the parachute didn't deploy plus our rocket started to spiral in weird directions. We don't know why the rocket started to move funny but what we do know is, is that our nose cone started to stick to our rocket and caused everything to suck. We learned about how much mass affected our rocket, how much water we needed to get the rocket up high and how much pressure is needed. The mass was not a problem, the fins were not light but they were sturdy. The nose cone had enough mass cause it was an athletic cone and had clay in it to weigh it down. When we added water we made sure that we filled it up to at least half the bottle. We tried to keep the water constant as much as possible. For the pressure, the pump nozzle gave us a hard time cause it kept leaking out the water and made the pressure less on our rocket. Other than that we didn't learn anything else.

When we folded the parachute we had each hole that had string tide to it folded next another one. Each side had four holes. We then had the string folded in the middle and then we wrapped the parachute around the string like a quesadilla. This made the parachute deploy without hassle like in our second launch.