Glenn B. Stearns

Being one of 700 current customers isn’t enough for Glenn B. Stearns, founder of Santa Ana’s Stearns Lending and related companies, who boasts that his firm is the nation’s second-largest privately held mortgage company with $500 million in annual revenues.

Reached on a yacht in the British Virgin Islands, Stearns, 50, said he has invested $17 million in developing a new island resort with Branson. In exchange, he said, “I want to be on the first flight. I’m definitely planning on it.”

And why? “It’s my personality,” he said. “I don’t like to be like all the others.”

Stearns and his wife, Mindy, a former KTLA entertainment reporter, gained notoriety a few years ago for playing “The Millionaire and His Wife” on the TBS reality show “The Real Gilligan’s Island.”

Mindy Stearns, speaking from the yacht, said she has no interest in space travel. “I’m so grounded,” she quipped.

As for her husband’s plans, “She said, ‘Get your affairs in order – your life insurance,” Glenn Stearns said. “It was sort of joking. Or sort of not.”

J. Edwin Holliday

J. Edwin Holliday, however, is not one of the doubters. Holliday, 70, a Laguna Niguel-based partner in a Los Angeles investment firm, L&S Advisors, is a longtime pilot who, until recently, flew his own plane to meet with clients. “I have no apprehensions,” he said.

“They’ve been flying the airplane, WhiteKnightTwo, for three years and they’ve gotten the bugs out. Now they’re flying the spaceship.”

The son of a West Virginia bus driver, Holliday was among the first to buy a ticket, in early 2006. “I was in high school when Sputnik went up,” he said. “I always wanted to go to space.”
He asks: “Have you seen the movie ‘Gravity’? The Earth will look like a big ball. It will be life altering, a unique experience.”

Kelly Thornton Smith

Another Orange County astronaut, Kelly Thornton Smith, the ex-wife of former Quest Software chief executive Vincent “Vinny” Smith, are friends with Branson. They have spent time at his Necker Island resort in the British Virgin Islands.

Smith, 48, said Branson encouraged her idea to start a yoga and meditation school, the Center for Living Peace, after her divorce. And he persuaded her to sign up for the space flight after she attended a few of his celebrity-studded gatherings for wealthy executives and philanthropists.

‘THEY HAVE GREAT PARTIES’

“I came to it for the excitement,” Smith said, whipping out her iPhone to show photos of several bashes. “The Galactic astronauts are a fun bunch. They have great parties.”

But Smith had another inspiration too. Her mother, a small-town middle school teacher, had applied to the Teacher in Space project on the Challenger shuttle, which blew up in 1986 with teacher Christa McAuliffe aboard.

“My mom taught earth science,” Smith said. “She wanted to go.”

Julie A. Hill

Julie A. Hill, a 67-year-old Newport Beach executive, wants to be fully prepared for the experience. So she recently spent $3,000 for two days of flight simulation at the National Aerospace Training and Research Center in Pennsylvania.

“The centrifuge machine was a hoot,” Hill said. “Now I know what 6g feels like. It’s intense – like having baby elephants on your chest.”

Hill, a former real estate CEO who serves on corporate boards, said she and her brother, a vice president at Aerojet Rocketdyne in Canoga Park, bought tickets together three years ago and are expecting “a hell of a ride.”

Explaining the attraction, she quotes a World War II-era poem beloved by pilots: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth/And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings …”

Yet Hill retains her sense of humor about the trip.

“I told Richard Branson I won’t go up with Lady Gaga,” she said. “I don’t want her to sing to me in space. Also, can we pre-screen for barfers?”

David L. Horowitz

Ticket-holder David L. Horowitz, former owner of what was once Orange County’s biggest concrete company, Standard Concrete, insists, “It’s not all rich business guys.” At one astronaut gathering, he said, he met a San Diego scientist who had mortgaged her home to buy a ticket.

Horowitz, 62, signed up for the ride about eight years ago, one of a “founders” group of 100 investors. “For me it’s the visual thing – the black of space, the blue of Earth, the curve of the Earth,” Horowitz said. “And the fact I would play a part in the pioneer history of private commercial space flight.”

Frank Kavanaugh

When Frank Kavanaugh was a boy, he marveled at the Apollo launches, devoured science fiction and guzzled orange-hued Tang. “The astronauts drank Tang,” he recalls, “and I wanted to be an astronaut.”

For Kavanaugh and other children of the 1960s, “the space race was in the fabric of our lives,” he said. “It was the cool place where people were innovating, exploring, dreaming.”
Today, at age 53, the Aliso Viejo private equity executive is ready to relive the dream – up close.

Kavanaugh, who made a fortune manufacturing explosive-resistant trucks during the Iraq War, is among more than a dozen Orange County residents and nearly 100 Californians who have reserved places on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic spaceline.

The Mojave-based company is promising a two-hour trip in a six-passenger rocket, vaulting amateur astronauts 68 miles beyond Earth’s surface. Company news releases tout “an out-of-the-seat, zero-gravity experience with astounding views of the planet from the black sky of space.”

“My kids say, ‘Dad, you’re totally not an astronaut,’ ” Kavanaugh said with a boyish grin. “But in my little brain I am. I believe space is an important part of our future.”

Anthony Nobles

“It was on my bucket list,” said Anthony Nobles, a biomedical entrepreneur who recently bought a ticket. “I’ve done everything else on the list.”

Anthony Nobles, 49, grew up poor in Detroit, and went on to launch several surgical suture companies, including Sutura Inc. and Nobles Medical Technologies II. He is best known in Orange County for his spectacular Fountain Valley “Nobles’ Halloween Celebration” display each year with scores of actors and robots attracting thousands of visitors.

Bucket list check-offs: Anthony Nobles likes showing off his 2012 Concorso, maintaining Nobles Exotic Car Museum, driving his Formula One race cars on the streets of Monaco and flying his vintage war birds around Southern California.

“I’ve wanted to walk on the moon ever since I watched Neil Armstrong on TV,” Nobles said. “When you’re an underprivileged kid in bad circumstances, you want to live on another planet.”