Originally Posted by Seth Manson

They built the Skylab space station and six space shuttles, of which five were space-worthy. One hundred and thirty five shuttle launches. That's pretty significant.

Eleven Pioneer space probes. Pioneer 10 & 11 explored our outer planets and left our solar system carrying plaques about us just in case aliens should ever find them. Pioneer Venus 1 orbited Venus and studied it for over ten years. Pioneer Venus 2 sent four probes into Venus to learn about it's atmosphere.

Voyager 1 & 2 space probes. They studied Saturn and Jupiter and told us much of what we know about those two planets, and now both are on their way out of our solar system. Last November, Voyager 1 was 10,712,000,000 miles from Earth and traveling at 11 miles per second.

Viking 1 & 2 space probes. Both went to Mars and launched landers and gave us a shitload of data about the planet. This was in the 70's.

Helios space probes. The two of them were built to study heliocentric orbits around the sun and worked for nine years. The reached speeds of over 157,000mph. They dont function anymore but are still in orbit around the sun.

Hubble Space Telescope. Its amazing and has been in orbit and functioning for 21 years now. Its responsible for discovering many galaxies and sending back some awesome photographs.

Magellan space probe. it was the first deep space probe to be launched from a space shuttle and it was also the first probe to send back high resolution photos of the surface of Venus.

Galileo space probe. Another probe launched from a space shuttle, it used gravity assist fly-bys of Earth and Venus to get it to Jupiter. It was the first space probe to orbit Jupiter and was the first to do an asteriod fly-by, and launched a probe in Jupiter's atmosphere. After it studied Jupiter, it did close fly-bys of Jupiter's moon Europa and Io, before it was terminated by crashing into Jupiter's atmosphere. It flew for 14 years.

The Mars Global Surveyor. It sent back 240,000 high resolution images of mars and functioned for 10 years.

Mars Exploration Rovers. They were both designed to land on Mars study the Mars surface and geology for 90 days. They've been functioning for 7 years and discovered water on the planet.

The New Horizons Probe. It launched in 2006 and is currently on its way to Pluto and will arrive there in 2015, and will study Pluto and then fly out of our solar system to study the Kuiper Asteriod Belt.

LCROSS Moon Probe in 2009. It was actually two probes, one crashed into the moon and the other studied the debris cloud, and found a significant amount of water on the moon. And thats important if we ever plan on an extended stay there.

A shitload of commercial, weather, military, communications, and GPS satellites have been launched. You cant have GPS without GPS satellites.

So, what has NASA been doing for 40 years?
I guess nothing.

Now, show me your spooky.