Decades later, Lem declared about The Astronauts: Everything is so smooth and balanced; among the heroes we have a positive Russian character and a sweet Chinese; naiveté is present on all pages of this book.

The hope that in the year 2000 the world would be wonderful is indeed very childish....[1]On November 23, 2011, to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the release of The Astronauts, an elaborate interactive Google Doodle,[2] inspired by the illustrations of Daniel Mróz in The Cyberiad, was presented.

Communism has emerged as the worldwide form of government and humankind, freed from oppression and chaos, is engaged in gigantic engineering projects such as irrigation of the Sahara Desert, construction of a hydro-energetic plant over the Strait of Gibraltar, and the ability to control the climate.

Scared, the government of the Earth (consisting of scientists) decides to send a newly built nuclear-powered spaceship, the Kosmokrator[a] (equipped with a vacuum tube-based computer called Marax) to Venus.

After a few weeks, the international crew of the Kosmokrator arrives on Venus but finds no traces of life, only strange, half-destroyed technological structures like the "White Globe", a giant anti-gravity device.