Mojave city, located at the west of the homonymous desert, was established in 1876. It owes its birth to the railway boom, which has seized California in the last half of XIX century; by the Southern Pacific Railroad plans, this was where a large railway junction was supposed to be. For decades, the railway transport and the mining played the main part in the life of Mojave. Even now, Mojave, located where two railways and two highways meet, is one of the key transport junctions in Southern California.

25 miles to the northeast of Mojave, where Sierra-Nevada and El Paso mountain ranges converge, Red Rock Canyon State Park is located. It is both a wildlife sanctuary and a museum of the mining industry of the end of XIX century.

This is about all one could say about Mojave; there are many places like it in California. But there is another sight in Mojave, which makes this village (and, it actually does not even have a city status) world renown, and that is a local airport. Though "airport” is not the right word. It was established in 1935 for servicing the local airlines, but through several decades became one of the largest in the world training-testing center for civil and military aviation, and a space research center, with an airfield capable of accepting and servicing any type of aircraft. One of only two civilian-operated test pilot schools in the world is located here. Edwards Air Force Base, where space shuttles land from time to time, is also cantoned nearby. Subdivisions of many large companies, like General Electric or BAe Systems, and many smaller high tech firms like Scaled Composites, XCOR Aerospace, Space Launch Corp., Orbital Sciences Corp. and others are located in Mojave itself.

Ii is not for nothing that in Mojave at Research department of Scaled Composites headed by Burt Rutan the legendary Voyager aircraft was built, on which a crew of two made a non-stop flight around the world in 1986. Currently the department completed another new plane, GlobalFlyer, this time for a solo around-the-world non-stop non-refueled flight.

In 2004, another prominent event happened in the history of Mojave, the airport became a spaceport. On June 17, 2004, the Federal Aviation Administration issued it a license to launch space vehicles. At this location, (already three times in a few months) took off and successfully landed the first in the world private manned sub-orbital reusable space ship, SpaceShipOne, built by the same Scaled Composites. On the third flight the ship reached the record for the sub-orbital vehicles altitude – 112 kilometers. This way Scaled Composites won the Anzari X-Prize, 10 million dollars, promised to the first non-government organization that would build a spacecraft to fly at 100 kilometers or higher.

Mojave owes its world fame to the Nature and its location in it. Removed from big cities, having no ecology-imposed constraints (that for noise in particular), an even terrain, 360 sunny days an year, it has ideal conditions for landing and takeoff, technical service and storage for an aircraft of any purpose or size.