Why? Suspicions point to liftoff damage.

Byline: MARK BAKER The Register-Guard

ALVADORE - Anne Haynes has always known that her daughter, Wendy Lawrence, had the right stuff.

"I looked at her face and she was so determined," Haynes said, remembering that July day in 1969 when her 10-year-old daughter, watching on television as men walked on the moon, proclaimed that one day, she too would be an astronaut.

Next year Lawrence is scheduled to make her fourth sojourn into space, an achievement that has been the source of great joy for her parents who live in Alvadore.

But on Saturday, when the space shuttle Columbia exploded on re-entry, Anne and Ralph Haynes felt the anguish that can accompany their pride.

"There's always a level of anxiety when you watch this piece of equipment go up," said Ralph Haynes, whose daughter, Lt. Cmdr. Wendy Lawrence, is a NASA astronaut and a veteran of three space shuttle missions.

"And the Challenger is always in your thoughts," he said, referring to the space shuttle tragedy on Jan. 27, 1986, which killed all seven astronauts on board, including school teacher Christa McAuliffe.

Asked if he'll be more apprehensive the next time his daughter goes into space, Haynes said it's not likely; his anxiety level can't get much greater.

Now retired, Haynes moved to Oregon in 1987 to become pastor of St. Thomas Episcopal Church in Eugene. He and his wife sat in the living room of their immaculate, country-style home Saturday and reflected on the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia.

The Hayneses were thinking about Lawrence who spent the day in Houston, grieving with the families of the dead astronauts. Lawrence, 43, knew all seven.

"These are the people you see everyday and you share their lives with them," said Anne Haynes, who, along with her husband, has watched all three of her daughter's launches into space, the most recent in 1998.

Although the Hayneses' reaction was a visceral one, many Lane County residents did not seem to feel a strong connection to the tragedy .

"This one's an everyday thing, it's like a car crash," said Jerry Benedict of Springfield, as he sat watching his 7-year-old son, Brandon, get a haircut at the Riviera Barber Shop in North Eugene. "Like most people, I didn't even realize they were up there."

The barber shop's television showed a college basketball game between Kansas and Nebraska. Barber Darrell Meharry said he switched the channel from the disaster coverage because he'd seen enough. "It just got repetitious," he said, as he cut Brandon's hair. "They kept showing that thing just like the trade center. I just got kind of sick of it."

At the University of Oregon's "Break Room," filled with pool tables, pinball machines and a big-screen television in the basement of the Erb Memorial Union, no one was watching coverage of the disaster at noon.

"I just turned it on for background noise," said Katie Plein, 21, a UO senior who opens the room every Saturday at 11 a.m. "I was watching it at home. They kind of repeat everything about every 15 minutes. A lot of students were out late last night and may not be awake yet."

Down the hall, seven students who were wide awake were seated in a computer lab.

"Oh, yeah, I heard about that on the news," said Andrea Walter, 25, a UO senior, who was reading her e-mail. Asked why she wasn't parked in front of a TV somewhere, Walter said: "Because I'm pretty self-absorbed, I think. I mourned this morning as I listened to it on the news."

At the Eugene Hilton, Chris Trudo of McMinnville and Laura Gaston of Roseburg, sat watching the coverage in the hotel's bar. They were in town for the 33rd Annual Oregon Loggers Conference. As they watched the TV, dozens of other conference attendees with name tags on milled about around the corner, checking out displays and an unplugged television that one of them would win as a prize.

"We've all gotten so (blase) about these flights," Gaston said. "I didn't even know one was up."

"This reminds me of 17 years ago," Trudo said. "It's just really sad. I feel sorry for the families."

In Alvadore, the Hayneses were also grieving for the family members, especially those they know personally.

The Hayneses met astronaut Kalpana Chawla, a native of India and one of the seven killed Saturday, a few years ago before one of their daughter's flights.

She was "just a delightful, small woman - about 5-foot nothing," Ralph Haynes said.

On other occasions, the Hayneses dined with other astronauts and their families at Cape Canaveral. "It's a very close-knit community," Ralph Haynes said.

The Hayneses spoke with their daughter on the phone Saturday night. She told them it had "been a long, hard day," Anne Haynes said.

But the tragedy wouldn't deter their daughter, a former U.S. Naval Academy officer and a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anne Haynes said. "Wendy has always said to us that this is an acceptable risk, the opportunity to live out a childhood dream."

SILVERTON ASTRONAUT AT SPACE STATION

Astronaut Donald Pettit, a 1973 graduate of Silverton High School, is one of three astronauts still in space.

"I'm numb, just like everybody else around here," said Michelle Pettit, Donald Pettit's wife, by telephone from Houston after the Columbia space shuttle explosion Saturday.

Pettit is an astronaut on the Expedition 6 crew, currently aboard the international space station. The crew was scheduled to return from a four-month mission in March, but that's now uncertain with NASA expected to keep all of its shuttles grounded until an investigation into Saturday's Columbia tragedy is complete.

An Associated Press story reported Saturday that the three astronauts, Pettit, Ken Bowersox and Russian Soyuz commander Nikolai Budarin, could remain in space until June and may return to Earth via a Soyuz vehicle attached to the space station.

- Mark Baker

CAPTION(S):

Astronaut Wendy Lawrence has been on three space shuttle missions.