LOUISVILLE, Ky. — As Churchill Downs goes, so goes Louisville, according to a circuit judge who struck down a citywide smoking ban citing an exemption for the famed horse track.

A Jefferson Circuit Judge ruled that because an exemption in the smoking ban crafted for Churchill Downs was unconstitutional, the entire law was illegal.

“Only after voting that Churchill Downs would keep its exemption did the Council pass the Smoke Free Law; the converse of this fact is that the Council would not have passed a Smoke Free Law devoid of said exemption,” Judge Steven Ryan wrote.

The decision hinged on a previous court ruling, from November, that struck down the exemption allowing smoking in some parts of the historic racetrack.

The ruling means the city cannot cite smokers, restaurants or bars for allowing patrons to light up inside.

Louisville’s metro council passed the ban to keep smoking out of all public places except for Churchill Downs and any tobacco manufacturer that conducts research and development for tobacco products on site.

The council exempted facilities regulated by the Kentucky Horse Racing Authority. The Metro Louisville Hospitality Coalition filed a lawsuit challenging Churchill Downs’ exemption and asked that the ban be overturned as arbitrary and vague.

The smoking ban replaced a less-stringent ordinance that allowed smoking in bars and restaurants that receive less than 75 percent of their revenue from the sale of food.

NASA to delay Mars launch two years, bumps cost by $40 million

WASHINGTON — NASA will wait two years longer than planned and spend another $40 million to launch a half-billion-dollar probe to Mars because of an unspecified conflict of interest in the purchasing process, officials said Friday.

The Mars Scout program had scheduled a 2011 launch of the $475 million Mars atmospheric probe and was going to choose proposals for the mission from one of two Colorado research institutions. But a “serious” conflict of interest in one of the proposals forced NASA to disband the board formed to pick the proposal, officials said, declining to elaborate.

The agency created an entirely new panel, and that caused a delay in awarding the contract, Mars Exploration Program Director Doug McCuistion said. And since Mars only comes close enough to Earth to launch probes every 26 months, NASA had to postpone the mission from 2011 to 2013, he said.

NASA will have no Mars mission in 2011, the first time in more than a decade that the U.S. space agency will miss an opportunity to explore the Red Plane.