For many folks, the phrase “Kentucky Space” may come as a surprise.

After all, the state lies in the heart of Appalachia, a region of the United States known better for mountains, music and coal mining than science and technology.

Actually, Kentucky has a storied sci-tech history. I know the state as a place where settlers built kilns and furnaces, and chemists used an ample resource, corn, to develop a new whiskey called bourbon. Nineteenth Century masons labored over ancient sea beds in the center of the state to pry limestone from the ground, and laid hundreds of miles of stone fences held together solely by gravity.

Today in the Commonwealth, some very driven people are writing their own chapter of space exploration based on vision, entrepreneurial risk, and scientific and engineering know-how. Let me share with you their stories and a secret.

Kentucky Space: one tiny spacecraft and a big idea

The non-profit Kentucky Space was created in 2006 after an encounter between Bob Twiggs, head of the Space Systems Development Lab at Stanford University, and Kris Kimel, president of the Lexington-based Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation. Kimel was attracted to the idea that a CubeSat, a four-by-four-inch spacecraft, could be a relatively inexpensive way to get to space while expanding STEM opportunities and building a new industry. Space, he rightly observed, was no longer the sole domain of nations.

Space exploration is a highly interdisciplinary project. Embedded software and radio choices must be made and harmonized into a self-reporting device traveling at roughly 17,500 miles per hour. Good systems engineering is crucial, as are professional relationships and people skills.

Kentucky Space soon developed a “single-unit” (one four-by-four-inch module) CubeSat named KySat, pieces of which, sadly, lie somewhere at the bottom of the South Pacific Ocean because of the failure of a launch vehicle faring to separate.

Crucially, the organization negotiated a non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement with NASA, which meant that Kentucky Space could be included on the manifest of any NASA partner going to orbit. That foresight has proven useful.

It also lured Bob Twiggs to teach at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, where he has instructed students—predominantly drawn from Kentucky—in the science of spaceflight.

Space Tango: ISS research as a service

Speaking at a meeting hosted by Kentucky Space several years ago, Julie Robinson, NASA’s program scientist for the International Space Station, said that for the first time in history, experimenters could control for gravity.

We know that human cells and genes behave and express themselves differently in zero-G. Providing fast, iterative, reasonably priced research aboard the ISS National Laboratory might offer scientists new insights into disease pathologies on Earth. That was the idea behind Space Tango, a for-profit spin-off of Kentucky Space now working to offer real-time, secure, browser-based data for investigators. Think of it a space-as-a-service.

Space Tango CEO Twyman Clements, a University of Kentucky mechanical engineering graduate, was incidentally one of the first two Kentucky Space hires and guided work on KySat-2, which flew successfully in 2013. Clements and the Space Tango team recently returned from the Kennedy Space Center and the company’s Florida office in the Space Life Science Lab, having attended the historic SpaceX launch from pad 39A. Space Tango’s work was aboard that ISS commercial resupply mission, or CRS-10.

Flatworms and a blood glucose experiment to test sensor technology are scheduled for CRS-11. And on CRS-12, there will be a wide variety of experiments, including cell culture and pilot manufacturing on orbit, as well as TangoLab, which will feature improved airflow and networking. The immediate goal is to identify use cases that can scale. The company, according to Clements, is looking toward a post-ISS future.

To complement frequent trips to low-Earth orbit and back, the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation has created the Exomedicine Institute, which has carried out an extensive study of the available literature on microgravity and human health.

Could the next breakthrough in human health happen in space?