The future Cislunar Gateway station, currently under construction at Thales Alenia Space, will orbit the Moon and provide the first remote operations for the base. Compared to the current International Space Station it will be significantly smaller, which is why the management of storage space was one of the issues most explored with Thales Alenia Space during the initial design phase.

The main objective of the Gateway Ring is to increase the volume for containment without affecting the habitability of the modules. The solution is a ring of individual boxes that rotate on the outside of the Gateway Cislunar station and are accessible to the astronauts from the inside. This innovation allows the total containment volume on the outside to be increased by 10% to 30% for the storage of water, food, medicine, waste and also materials for experiments, while leaving more space inside for activities. The system allows access to each box from inside the module, controlled by a series of sensors that monitor the pressure of each container. Each box has a small access hatch. An interface inside the module allows the astronauts to select the box they want to access, and the robot on the rail moves the box in front of the hatch. On the outside, a robotic arm positioned around the ring rotates it to place the selected box in the desired location.

In the future, the entire surface of the module, both outside and inside, could be made up of rotating rings, connected to other habitats or power modules to power the system for deep space exploration. On arrival at a planet, the modules could be distributed across the surface, providing a ready-made modular storage system.