Tech-billionaire Jeff Bezos took an 11-minute space ride in his Blue Origin New Shepard space aircraft on July 20. He was accompanied by his brother Mark, 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, and 82-year-old Wally Funk, a female aviation pioneer.

Prior to this, the Blue Origin rocket has had 15 successful test launches but has never flown humans before. So one must wonder how safe is the aircraft?

Blue Origin’s senior director Gary Lai, who is a former NASA employee, said that it is the safest capsule and vehicle ever made for a man’s flight to space.

He further added that he would even fly his children on board, CNN reported.

“Every system on board that is needed for safety has a backup. And in most cases, there is a backup to the backup,” CNN quoted him as saying.

“The biggest backup system on board is the crew escape system. If there is something that’s detected that’s wrong with the rocket, it will automatically ignite a solid rocking motor that will propel the capsule away … and land safely,” he added.

Giving another example of how safe the rocket is, Lai said: “We have three parachutes on board; they open every time. We’ve never had a failure. But only one of them actually has to open to land safely. And that’s just the start. Every computer on board, every battery, every sensor, every wire, every mechanism that we need for safety has one or two backups.”

Blue Origin’s New Shepard is a 60-foot-tall autonomous reusable rocket-and-capsule combo. It is named after astronaut Alan Shepard, the first American to go to space.

As Bezos took off in space, he made quite a few records. First, this was the first unpiloted launch. Secondly, spaceflight included the oldest and the youngest people to travel to space.

Earlier in the month, British billionaire Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic made the first suborbital flight from New Mexico pioneering a new age of space tourism.