Pelevin uses this story to illustrate the underlying absurdity of the Soviet establishment with its fixation on "heroic achievements", especially in those fields of human endeavor which could be favorably presented to the outside world—science, the military, and most significantly space exploration.

Omon soon finds that the academy does not, in fact, create future pilots, but instead exposes cadets to a series of treacherous trials, beginning with the amputation of both of their feet.

These amputations come as a reference to a famous Soviet ace-pilot Alexey Maresyev, who, despite being badly injured in a plane crash after a dogfight, managed to return to Soviet-controlled territory on his own.

Desperate to return to his fighter pilot career, he subjected himself to nearly a year of physical therapy and exercise to master control of his prosthetic devices.

Before any intentional amputation can occur, Omon and his friend are whisked out of the academy into a top-secret installation, located under KGB headquarters in Moscow.

Omon is told that to substitute for researching, building and launching an automated probe, the Party prefers to use people, trained for "heroism", to fulfill the tasks nominally performed by machines, such as rocket stage separation, space vehicle course correction and so on.

This he does, even though once he leaves the confines of the hermetically sealed Lunokhod, his protection against the vacuum and the interstellar cold consists of a cotton-filled overcoat and "special hydrocompensatory tampons" (which are really just oiled cotton balls)[4] stuffed up his nose.

One of Omon's "teachers" explains the idea behind the charade: even if the fact that the Soviet Union is a champion of peaceful space exploration holds true only inside a person's head (namely, the hero's; no one knows of him or his mission apart from its organizers), this is not any different from it being the reality.

The reality, when it concerns subjects not capable of being experienced, is in fact only a perception formed in people's consciousness, and can be manipulated to the extent that the question of "true" version of events becomes meaningless.