BEST ROCKET LAUNCH

Rocket Factory, by Tom Sachs

- NICK COMPTON

Tom Sachs is art’s astro-conceptualist, a Nasa obsessive who has devised and equipped his own bricolage space programme. His New York studio is both rocket workshop and mission control, stitching together spacesuits and knocking up landing modules, perfectly imperfect replicas in steel, plywood and foam that celebrate the design and engineering ‘right stuff’ that has taken man to the moon, if not far beyond. (Because he can, Sachs has gone further.

In 2012, he put astronauts on Mars and in 2016, he explored Europa, an ice-gripped moon of Jupiter). His latest exploration of the rocketeer mythos, Rocket Factory, launched him into the art world’s next digital dimension, NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Sachs calls the project a ‘transdimensional manufacturing plant’ that creates branded NFT rocket parts.