Reaper98270

Very early in the tech tree you have to build something wider to be able to get drag if you're going too high. You can try, for example, attaching the command pot on top of the science materials and then strap two of the solid rockets (one you already have) to either side of the materials bay. This will create more drag and slow you down below the 250m/s you need. The other part is once you get your first inline decoupler, you don't really need to worry about it because you can decouple down to just the pod and then it is easy to keep pointing retrograde to slow down (throwing a heat shield on the bottom of it when you unlock it in the tech tree for less-than-ideal re-entry angles). The reason your current ship design ends up nose down is because the command pod's weight causes your COM (center of mass) to be towards that end of the rocket. The rocket fuel is drained and that moves the COM up the rocket until it is so high up that all it does is tip it nose down, preventing you from getting any drag. This means another alternative is to leave enough fuel in your tanks to not tip nose-down when you're descending (don't descend on completely empty tanks until you have a decoupler to get down to just the command module).