At SpaceRobotics.EU, we are presenting a new version of Gateway VR, our Virtual Reality experience designed to recreate life, work, and operations aboard a space station orbiting the Moon. This update represents a major evolution from the first version developed in 2024, introducing greater interactivity and new activities focused on communications between lunar orbit, Earth, and future infrastructure on the lunar surface.
The first version of the project was created with the aim of developing an immersive simulation of the interior of Lunar Gateway, allowing users to virtually explore its modules, discover the areas designed for astronauts to live and work, and experience an environment that, at the time, represented one of the key elements of the international architecture planned for Artemis. The experience also included virtual missions to the lunar surface and a range of content related to space exploration.
Since then, both our technology and international plans for returning to the Moon have evolved considerably. For this reason, the new version of Gateway VR goes beyond improving the visual environment: it expands the concept by transforming the station into an operational scenario where users can explore and understand some of the technological challenges involved in maintaining a sustained human presence around and on the Moon.
From Exploring Gateway to Performing Operations Inside the Station
One of the main objectives of this new release has been to significantly increase interaction with the environment. Rather than simply allowing users to walk through a three-dimensional recreation of a space station, we want them to operate its systems and understand some of the activities that would be required aboard an infrastructure located hundreds of thousands of kilometres from Earth.
The experience introduces new activities related to communications with our planet, providing an opportunity to explore concepts associated with deep-space telecommunications and the need to keep the different elements involved in a mission permanently connected. In a future scenario of sustained lunar exploration, this network will need to connect astronauts, mission control centres, orbital stations, spacecraft, landers, rovers, scientific instruments, and bases located on the lunar surface.
Alongside these Earth-to-orbit communications, the experience now incorporates another particularly interesting element: communications between Gateway and the lunar surface. Users can operate within a scenario in which the station functions as one component of a much larger architecture, establishing communications with a future lunar base and providing a visual way to understand the relationship between three environments that will be fundamental to the coming decades of exploration: Earth, cislunar space, and the surface of the Moon.
An Experience That Evolves Alongside Lunar Exploration
This new version also arrives at a particularly interesting moment. The lunar exploration architecture that originally inspired Gateway VR has changed substantially during 2026. As part of its new budget planning, NASA announced the orderly shutdown of the Gateway program and the evaluation of potential alternative uses for components that had already been developed. In April 2026, the agency also issued a stop-work order affecting HALO, one of the station’s main habitation modules.
This situation is particularly significant because Gateway was conceived as an international infrastructure involving NASA and partners including ESA, JAXA, CSA, and MBRSC, designed to support missions to the lunar surface, conduct science from lunar orbit, and contribute to the development of technologies required for future human missions beyond the Earth-Moon system.
However, changes to a specific architecture do not eliminate the technological challenges that Gateway was intended to address. Lunar exploration continues to advance towards scenarios in which spacecraft, astronauts, bases, scientific instruments, and robotic systems distributed between Earth, lunar orbit, and the surface will need to operate in a coordinated manner. In fact, the new U.S. strategy has reorganized capabilities related to mobility, habitation, logistics, communications, navigation, and lunar infrastructure within a program focused on establishing a sustained presence on the surface.
This new context also gives our experience a particularly interesting new dimension: Gateway VR can evolve from the simulation of a specific space station into a broader platform for representing and experiencing the cislunar operations of the future.
Communications Will Be a Fundamental Infrastructure Around the Moon
The new activities incorporated into Gateway VR focus on one of the areas that will likely be essential to any future lunar architecture: telecommunications and navigation. As the number of missions operating simultaneously around the Moon increases, relying exclusively on direct communications between each spacecraft or vehicle and Earth will become increasingly impractical.
Europe is already making significant progress in this field through Moonlight, ESA’s programme designed to provide communications and navigation services around the Moon. Its initial architecture consists of five satellites — four dedicated to navigation and one to communications — connected to ground stations and providing enhanced coverage over the lunar south pole, one of the priority regions for future exploration missions.
This type of infrastructure helps explain why the communications activities incorporated into our experience extend far beyond the original Gateway station concept. A sustained human and robotic presence will require the different elements of an architecture distributed across approximately 400,000 kilometres to remain connected, providing communications, data transmission and navigation services between our planet and operations taking place around and on the Moon.
Virtual Reality provides a particularly effective way to represent these relationships. Instead of explaining a communications network exclusively through diagrams, we can place the user inside one of its operational nodes, allowing them to understand how an orbital station, Earth and infrastructure located on the lunar surface can communicate and operate as part of a connected system.
Concepts Explored in the Experience with Moonlight Connectivity (Connection with Satellites Around the Moon)
From a 3D Recreation to an Interactive Simulator
The evolution of Gateway VR also reflects the way we develop this type of project at SpaceRobotics.EU. Our goal is not simply to create a visually impressive three-dimensional recreation of a spacecraft, space station or mission, but to use technology to transform the way it operates into an experience that can be explored, operated and understood.
To achieve this, we combine 3D modelling and design, programming, user interfaces, simulation, technical documentation, and knowledge of space missions and technologies. Depending on the application, these developments can incorporate control systems, virtual displays, scientific operations, telecommunications, navigation, spacecraft and vehicles, robotics, or interaction with other elements of a mission.
The new version of Gateway VR takes another step in precisely this direction. The interior of the station progressively moves beyond being simply the setting for the experience and becomes an operational environment, where the actions performed by the user are connected to the functions that would be carried out by real space infrastructure.
This approach also allows us to adapt the simulator for different applications in museums, science centres, space agencies and institutions, universities, educational centres, exhibitions and events, adjusting both the level of interaction and the scientific and technological complexity according to the audience and the objectives of each project.
Simulators Capable of Adapting to Missions That Are Still Evolving
Working with future space projects presents a challenge that we find particularly interesting: many of the missions, vehicles and infrastructures we represent are still evolving while we develop our experiences. Architectures change, individual elements are redesigned, new technologies emerge and, in some cases, entire programmes are reformulated before they ever become a physical reality.
Simulation makes it possible to respond to this evolution in a way that would be considerably more complex with a physical installation. Virtual environments can be updated to incorporate new configurations, vehicles, interfaces, operations and scenarios. For this reason, although Gateway VR was originally developed around a specific lunar station architecture, it can continue to evolve while representing concepts that remain fundamental to future exploration: lunar-orbit operations, long-distance communications, coordination with the lunar surface, habitability, logistics and the management of infrastructure beyond Earth.
In this sense, the history of Gateway itself makes the experience an interesting example of how Virtual Reality can be used to document, explain and experience space architectures even before they physically exist, while also allowing the simulation to evolve as real programmes, technologies and exploration strategies change.
Gateway VR 2026: A Window into Future Cislunar Operations
At SpaceRobotics.EU, we have been developing Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, simulators, 3D models and interactive systems specifically applied to science, engineering and space exploration for many years. Gateway VR is part of this line of work and reflects our commitment to using immersive technologies not simply to show space, but to explain how missions operate and allow users to actively participate in them.
The new version significantly expands this concept. Communications with Earth and with a future base on the lunar surface introduce an operational dimension that provides a better understanding of how the different elements of a future human presence around the Moon could work together. At the same time, the simulator has been conceptually designed to continue evolving as international lunar exploration programmes, technologies and architectures develop.
The Gateway architecture that originally inspired our experience is undergoing a profound transformation, but the technological challenges it represented remain highly relevant. The next stages of lunar exploration will require communications, navigation, spacecraft, robotic systems, bases and other infrastructure capable of operating together across our planet, cislunar space and the surface of another world.
Gateway VR 2026 transforms part of that future, still under development, into an environment that we can already explore, experience and understand today.
