Photo by Joe Imel/Daily News Morehead State University student Jessamyn Delgado (right) lets go of the instrument package Monday as a high-altitude balloon is launched by Kentucky Space at the Bowling Green Warren County Regional Airport. The balloon carries a student-designed payload that will record data at the edge of space.

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While not exactly a rocket-fueled blast, Monday’s launch of a near-space balloon by Kentucky Space is anticipated to have wide-ranging implications for the state’s scientific community.

The latex balloon was launched at about 12:40 p.m. Monday from a field at the Bowling Green-Warren County Regional Airport.

The balloon reached a height of about 100,000 feet - nearly 20 miles up - and carried a scientific payload designed and built by students from several colleges and universities across the state, including Western Kentucky University.

Karen Hackney, director of the Kentucky Space Grant Consortium and a physics and astronomy professor at WKU, said the project, which took about three years to complete, would be the first of several student-led balloon and orbital satellite launches.

“Aerospace and technology companies will recognize what these students are doing and will know not just that they’re skilled but that they have the ability to develop skills,” Hackney said.

The scientific payload launched into near-space included a magnetometer to measure the magnetic fields in earth’s upper stratosphere, as well as an inertial measurement unit, which is used in the guidance systems in air and spacecraft.

Those instruments record data at the edge of space that will aid in the design of future orbital satellites by Kentucky Space.

The launch of Balloon-1 also carried an experimental communication package to be tested for possible use in the event of a major natural disaster in Kentucky.

Click here for a slideshow of the space balloon.

The package emitted a radio frequency that amateur radio operators could pick up on VHF airwaves.

Kris Kimel, a founder and president of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, said the project was funded by the combination of public grants and private financing, with the overall cost of the project amounting to about $10,000.

“We hope to have four to six balloon launches a year, testing systems that will ultimately go into orbital satellites,” Kimel said. “We’re also looking at deep-space missions four or five years into the future.”

Two high-resolution cameras were attached to the balloon, recording video of Kentucky from space.

A GPS system connected to the balloon enabled Kentucky Space students to track the flight of the balloon from a mobile command center at the airport.

A separate group of Kentucky Space students tracked the balloon near Tompkinsville, where it was expected to land nearly four hours after having been launched.

The balloon itself took about 30 minutes to inflate, with students coming under the guidance of Bill Brown of the High Altitude Research Corporation in Huntsville, Ala.

Wearing a NASA baseball cap, Brown advised Kentucky Space on the mission.

Tyler Doering, a 24-year old University of Kentucky graduate student, oversaw the student construction of the payload.

Doering said the project is relatively risk-free and inexpensive compared to future endeavors students would take on if they continued in the field.

“This was a good project for younger students,” said Doering of Walton, who earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from UK. “A lot of the students have engineering backgrounds and this provides invaluable hands-on experience.”

Tracking the balloon with a camera, Greg Mann of Clarksville, Tenn., said that the launch looked impressive.

“I’ve seen several of these launches from out of Huntsville, but I’ve never seen (a balloon) with that much equipment on it,” said Mann, an amateur radio operator.