I'm having the same issue. The chute doesn't show up in my staging menu and gives me a "cannot deploy" error when I initiate blastoff. Above a certain height (not sure exactly what it is) I get a red message saying unsafe to deploy chute and shortly thereafter the camera just stops and the rocket keeps going. I've found that if I go to the action group menu and select single chute model from the menu it works correctly. Unfortunately just starting a career the action menu is not available and with that being the only chute, it completely breaks the game. It seems at least some of the problem is there's an issue with it not selecting a chute model for the stock chutes. I couldn't find the settings for this in the files though so I wasn't able to try a fix.