Things are, presumably, fairly sad at NASA right now; all the space shuttles have taken their final rides and are now installed in their permanent, last resting places; funding for further manned missions has dried up because America, as a country, has no money at all anymore, anywhere, if you are not Mark Zuckerberg or that guy who runs Zynga, and besides, there’s nothing fun about going into space anymore because where are we supposed to go, back to the Moon? HA, the Moon is a dusty grey rock, why would we go there unless it’s to put up a casino like Newt Gingrich wanted. (Wait, that was Steve Austin from 30 Rock. Newt Gingrich just wanted the Moon to become a state. My bad.) So we are probably not going back to space anytime soon, because we do not have rockets big enough, and also we are broke, and no one wants to go into low Earth orbit anymore because all we got out of that was velcro and the Internet, who needs those things? Tom Sachs, however, is going to Mars, by God, deficits and boredom be damned, and he’d like us all to come with, starting on the 16th at the Park Avenue Armory, which is a big, big space that Tom Sachs is going to fill with all sorts of space stuff, like a life-sized model of the lunar lander and a beer fridge in the shape of Darth Vader, which must keep the beer exceptionally cold. (FULL ARTICLE: Randy Kennedy, The New York Times)