IF you wanted to find a good place in Manhattan from which to plan a manned mission to Mars, the studio of the artist Tom Sachs might not be the first place you would look.


On a stretch of Centre Street at the edge of SoHo that has achieved the antique polish of so many fashionable downtown blocks, the storefront studio stands out as a holdover from the neighborhood’s pre-money past. The main entrance is barricaded by a rusted metal cage and gate, behind which there is a beaten-up buzzer and a hand-scrawled sign that says, unhelpfully, “Brancusi.” If you didn’t know an artist and his assistants worked there, you could easily mistake the interior — encrusted with power tools and cubbyholes and bad fluorescent light fixtures — for a wholesale hardware supplier.


During a recent visit Mr. Sachs and his studio manager attempted to show off a scale model of the Saturn rocket that launched a generation of men to the Moon. But just as a demonstration was about to get under way to create a smoky, realistic-looking liftoff on a small video screen, power to the model went kaput. A space heater wired up in an old Winnebago parked out front had tripped a circuit breaker in the studio. “That’s crazy,” Mr. Sachs said, staring ahead in disappointment. “We’ve got to get it on a dedicated circuit. That should not happen.”


Then again the trip to Mars he has been planning obsessively for several years is not really the kind where an equipment failure would spell catastrophe, unless you concur with the artist Bruce Nauman’s dictum that art is a matter of life and death.


This Mars mission will go only as far up as the Upper East Side. The air its astronauts breathe will be of a late springtime New York City composition. The landing module from which they emerge will be made mostly from three-quarter-inch plywood and screws. And the surface their motorized rover explores will consist not of rocky red soil but of the flat century-old pine boards that form the immense drill floor of the Park Avenue Armory at East 66th Street, where for a month beginning Wednesday Mr. Sachs will become the latest artist to take on the daunting space. Since the Armory’s transformation in 2006 into one of the largest contemporary-art exhibition spaces in the country, artists have approached the drill floor’s 55,000 square feet with widely varied modes of assault. It has been draped with Lycra tulle (Ernesto Neto), “painted” with the aid of peeling-out motorcycles (Aaron Young), filled with 30 tons of discarded clothing (Christian Boltanski) and turned into an oddly didactic Renaissance painting classroom by the director Peter Greenaway, whose installation looked lost in the setting.


Mr. Sachs will likewise use the floor to display all manner of objects, some quite realistic — the rover, the lander (a life-size model of the real Apollo lunar lander), a mission control center, a mobile quarantine unit (the aforementioned 1972 Winnebago) — and many others that would never make a NASA manifest but that sound like pretty good things to pack for a very long interplanetary trip, like a hot-nuts machine, an old-school JVC boombox outfitted with solar panels and a beer fridge shaped like Darth Vader.


But his larger intention is to transform the drill hall into a theater for an extended piece of performance art, one that mines the United States space program for an entire prefabricated aesthetic — script, choreography, costumes, sets — and also for a complex load of cultural baggage about what fuels the compulsion to explore outer space.


Mr. Sachs, 45, has long had a reputation in the art world as a kind of high-comic tinkerer and provocateur who remakes industrial and consumer objects in an abject wood-shop fashion, as if to reclaim the mass-produced world for humanity or at least reopen humanity’s eyes to the things that increasingly make up its visual landscape. He has carried this objective to sometimes sensationalistic lengths. In 1999 the dealer Mary Boone was arrested after a Sachs show featuring handmade shotguns and an Alvar Aalto vase full of real bullets for people to take home. At the Jewish Museum in 2002 he exhibited a scale model of a German concentration camp made from a Prada hatbox, an equation of fashion and fascism whose “irony, if that’s what it was,” Michael Kimmelman wrote in The New York Times, was lost on the Holocaust survivors who wrote him in angry disbelief.