Mojave Air and Space Port
facility located in Mojave, California
The Mojave Air and Space Port (IATA: MHV, ICAO: KMHV) is a general-use public airport with three main areas of activity: flight testing, space industry development, and aircraft heavy maintenance and storage. Located in Mojave, California, at an elevation of 2,801 feet (854 m), the three runway facility covers 2,998 acres (1,213 ha). It is also the first facility licensed in the U.S. for horizontal launches of reusable spacecraft, having received its spaceport designation from the Federal Aviation Administration on June 17, 2004. It received the suffixed formal name Mojave Air and Space Port at Rutan Field in 2022.
History
In 1935, Kern County opened the Mojave Airport 0.5 miles (0.80 km) east of Mojave, California, to serve the gold and silver mining industry in the area. The airport had two dirt runways, one oiled, but no fueling or servicing facilities. In 1941, the Civil Aeronautics Board began improvements to the airport for national defense purposes that included two 4,500 by 150 feet (1,372 m × 46 m) asphalt runways and a taxiway. Kern County agreed the airport could be taken over by the military in the event of war.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the United States Marine Corps took over the airport and expanded it into Marine Corps Auxiliary Air Station (MCAAS) in Mojave. The two runways were extended and a third one added.
The public source identifies “Mojave Air and Space Port” as facility located in Mojave, California. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Mojave, Space and Port.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q390522. VIAF identifies the subject as 305279993. The Library of Congress control number is no2013097543. Authority coordinates are 35.059, -118.152. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004, 2022, 1935 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mojave Air and Space Port” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.