When you decide to swap your annual two weeks in the sun with a trip to the stars you've no need to worry about losing your luggage.

For a Braintree businessman has decided to offer insurance for travellers to the galaxy.

Simon Burgess thought up the unusual venture after news that package holidays to space could become available within ten years.

Mr Burgess, of Broad Oak Crescent, Braintree, is a managing partner of GRIP, a specialist insurance company, and is confident if space tours become a reality it will create a real business boom.

Flying to the moon for a two-week break may sound like the stuff of science fiction but it could become fact according to respected novelist and futurist Arthur C Clarke.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4's Today Programme, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey considered holidays in space to be quite practical and could become available at travel agents within a decade.

Now Mr Burgess has taken swift action to ensure they are ahead of the field: "We already have an insurance policy for space holidays and offer a full space travel package.

"We have already negotiated terms with Lloyds underwriters and we are currently the only company in the world to offer such insurance."

A New York-based association of travel agents has already expressed an interest in the policy and Mr Burgess is currently negotiating the details on a compulsory cover policy that will be offered to travellers at a one-off premium of £50.

But the firm is still 30 years behind travel company Thomas Cook.

Ever since Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon in 1969 Thomas Cook started a register of passengers who literally wanted the company to fly them to the moon - more than 10,000 people had signed up by 1996.

In 1973 it produced a booklet entitled Galactic Tours listing holidays on 23 planets, including Mars and Venus.

This is not the first time GRIP has developed some unusual insurance policies. Other cover available includes:

Protection against alien abduction

Cover against human cloning

Conversion into a werewolf or vampire

Insurance against the possibility of anthrax attacks launched by Saddam Hussein.

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.