MOJAVE, Calif. — The sign into town, slightly weathered, says “Gateway to Space!”

Beyond it lies the Mojave Air and Space Port, once a Marine auxiliary air station during World War II, now an incubator for the tinkerers and dreamers in the New Space movement. Adherents believe that the next phase of space exploration will be led by nimble, ambitious entrepreneurs — a new generation of people like Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard, who helped create the electronics industry in a garage — and that this is their moment to come together and make it happen.

“It’s very similar to the Silicon Valley effect,” said Stuart O. Witt, the chief executive of the space port for the past decade, explaining how half a dozen outer space start-ups came to cluster at Mojave, a small desert town about 90 miles north of Los Angeles.

This is where the first private, piloted spacecraft, SpaceShipOne, launched in 2004. Virgin Galactic is now conducting flight tests of a larger version, called SpaceShipTwo, that will take tourists on jaunts 62 miles up, giving them a brief bout of weightlessness. Small start-ups here are also developing new rocket fuels and trying to transform a discarded second stage of a rocket into a prototype moon lander.

This month, the headline event for this push of entrepreneurs will take place on the other side of the country, at Cape Canaveral, Fla., where the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, plans to launch cargo (but no people) to the International Space Station.