It’s worth noting that it’s not the parachutes that typically fail, rather, the deployment systems. You’re packing (by hand) a large area of fabric and cord in

It’s worth noting that it’s not the parachutes that typically fail, rather, the deployment systems. You’re packing (by hand) a large area of fabric and cord into a very small volume. You’re coating that fabric and cord with a variety of anti-stick substances, which have to be stable with extreme temperature and radiation levels, and huge vibrations. Parachutes are deployed in several ways - springs, hydraulics, compressed gas, explosives, drogues, and combinations thereof. For flight tests, parachutes are typically pre-stressed as though they’ve been to orbit and back. This wasn’t always the case. So - there’s a lot of surface area to go wrong purely around the problem of getting it to eject and unfurl, before you even start to think about the parachute itself.