# Future Perspectives for Gamma-ray Burst Detection from Space
## 1 Introduction  
About 57 years have already gone by since the first discovery of a gamma-ray burst (GRB) in 1967. This occurred genuinely by chance, while the U.S. _Vela_ military satellites were looking for evidence of nuclear bomb testing in space following the 1963 partial test-ban treaty (which prohibited testing in the atmosphere, outer space, and underwater). The existence of GRBs was later revealed to the scientific community, stimulating a fast-growing excitement for this fortunate discovery [1]. A number of experiments were quickly developed and launched into space, mainly by the Soviet Union and the United States, to boost the detection of similar events and understand their true nature. The inevitable requirement of space-based instrumentation to catch the unpredictable short and bright flash of high-energy radiation from these events largely contributed to boosting the international race in the development of cutting-edge technological detectors with exponentially increasing sensitivity, as well as the provision of more and more advanced platforms to ensure their most proficient operations (see, e.g., [2] for recent historical reviews on GRBs). A major leap forward in GRB research was first provided by the Konus-WIND satellite [3; 4] and the BATSE experiment on-board CGRO [5; 6], which allowed the determination of the dichotomy into short and long GRBs, established the isotropic distribution of the events in the sky, and led to the first characterization of their non-thermal emission (see, e.g., [7] and the references therein). Subsequently, the Italian-Dutch Beppo-SAX satellite, launched in 1996, unveiled the cosmological nature of these events by identifying for the first time the GRB X-ray afterglows and providing arcsec-accurate localizations of their host galaxies [8] (enabling also multi-wavelength observations with ground-based observatories). This was possible thanks to an on-board powerful suite of instruments covering a large energy-band (2-700 keV) and providing simultaneously a high sensitivity to faint sources via dedicated pointed observations and monitoring of a large fraction of the sky at once via large field-of-view (FoV) instruments [9] (achieving up to 20 \(\times\) 20 deg with full imaging and good localization capabilities of typically a few arcminutes). The size of the GRB community and its efforts to probe and understand the physics of these uniquely powerful cosmological explosions have been growing ever since. GRBs are also widely recognized to have a key role in many of the most debated aspects of research in astronomy and astrophysics. These range from the problems of fundamental physics, such as the equation of state of supra-density matter, to stellar evolution, via the collapse of massive stars and the production of both kilonovae and supernovae, to jet formation and dissipation, to the generation and propagation of gravitational waves, up to the quest for key cosmological parameters (see, e.g., [10; 11] and the references therein). In the most recent years, GRBs have also gained renewed interest as key sources in the field of multi-messenger astrophysics due to their association with kilonovae and gravitational wave (GW) sources (see, e.g., [12; 13; 14], the well-known cases of GRB 170817A, GRB 211211A, and GRB 230307A, and the references therein). Following the decommissioning of _Beppo-SAX_ in 2002, a number of successful missions have provided dramatic advancements in the fields related to GRBs. Among these, AGILE [15], Astro-SAT [16], Fermi [17], INTEGRAL [18], and the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory [19] are still operational and work in synergy also with ground-based multi-wavelength observatories to boost the detection and characterization of bright impulsive cosmological events (in addition to transients of different kinds).