AMERICAN NOTES: Taking It for Granted

It cost $2.6 billion and tapped the best of American technology; yet Skylab sometimes behaved like a castoff from a used-car lot. First it lost vital shielding and an electricity-generating solar wing. Then its steering rockets per formed so badly that NASA thought of sending up rescuers to evacuate its three-man crew. Finally, two of its stabilizing gyros faltered, threatening to send the 100-ton space station yawing and pitching like an angry whale.

Even these weighty problems, how ever, failed to excite a blase public. When the last of three Skylab crews finally splashed down off Lower Cali fornia last week, their successful home coming was not even given live cover age by the TV networks, though the astronauts had set a remarkable endurance record of 84 days in orbit.

There was also triumph for the space agency's latest unmanned spacecraft. Barely two years after a similar robot began the first detailed mapping of Mars, and only weeks after another peeked at giant Jupiter, a 1,108-lb. ship named Mariner 10 last week cruised by the earth's nearest neighbor, Venus. In the first clear pictures of the planet, Mariner's cameras showed great circular cloud formations, raising the possibility that Venus may have an atmospheric circulation something like the earth's.

But it is what lies unseen beneath the thick Venusian shroud that continues to fascinate scientists. Said Stanford Ra dar Astronomer H. Taylor Howard:

"Anybody with that much on must have a lot to hide!"