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...coyotes have loped off, and the rattlesnakes have crawled under the construction trailers for shade and safety. Bulldozers have scraped away the mesquite to make a board-flat rectangle 10,000 ft. by 200 ft. Workers have begun putting down layers of gravel, packed earth, asphalt and concrete 42 in. thick to form a runway. The age of space tourism is here...
Proponents hail this remote corner of New Mexico as an ideal location for a spaceport: the weather is dry and clear year round, and at 4,500 ft. above sea level, jokes Steve Landeene, the spaceport's executive director, "the first mile is free." Physicist Robert Goddard developed modern rocketry here in the 1930s; in 1947, a mysterious object crashed to earth outside Roswell, making the town synonymous with UFO conspiracy theories. Thanks to the restricted airspace over the neighboring White Sands Missile Range and Holloman Air Force Base, there's also hardly any commercial air traffic. (Watch an interview...
Measures like creating smoke-free buffer zones--so people don't have to walk through a cloud of smoke to get into and out of school buildings--have had limited success. "We have a 25-ft. smoke-free boundary around campus buildings," says Julee Stearns, health-promotion specialist at the University of Montana's Curry Health Center. "But what's 25 ft. to some people isn't necessarily 25 ft. to others." An all-out campus ban, says Stearns, removes the need for guesstimating. The university is considering such a rule, which could take effect as early as fall...
Purdue University, which has 30-ft. buffer zones, recently considered adopting a campuswide ban but tempered its proposal after receiving campus input. Smoking will now be restricted to limited outdoor areas...
...last-minute addition to a provision barring dispensaries from operating within a certain distance of sensitive-use areas. Previously, sensitive-use areas included schools, public parks and places of worship, but the council went on to include private residences in the list and increase the operating distance from 500 ft. to 1,000 ft. Some opponents say the provision is not viable and will force law-abiding dispensaries to either relocate to largely remote, industrial areas of the city or shut down altogether. "Council members have to come to their senses and recognize how dramatic this is," says Paul Koretz...