Why not parachutes?
I still don't get this. Parachutes are in daily use by armies for delivering troops and vehicles, and by skydivers all over the place, with a failure rate as close to zero as makes no difference. Parachute design is massively mature. When it comes to space, again parachutes are the tool of choice for dropping payloads onto planets with atmosphere, and they've generally worked pretty well, given that this kit has been completely out of contact with Earth and working on its own, and these atmospheres have been either corrosive (Venus) or unhelpfully thin (Mars).
So what's the technical problem with putting a parachute on a lower-stage booster rocket which is <1s comms from anywhere on Earth so any problems can easily be overridden remotely, the atmosphere is nice and dense so there's something to push against, and it doesn't actually have to get all the way out of the gravity well so extra weight isn't quite so much of an issue? It's a complete "does not compute" for me.