# Future Perspectives for Gamma-ray Burst Detection from Space
## 13 Conclusions  
In this paper, we provided an overview of a number of missions, either close to beginning scientific operations or being planned for the coming/far future, that are expected to dramatically widen our capability of detecting and characterizing bright impulsive transient events of astrophysical interest, such as (but not limited to) GRBs. The list of missions is not meant to be exhaustive, especially in view of the recent fast-growing interest of the international community in the fields of time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics, which is driving many parallel developments in several countries around the globe. The missions presented here have been or are being conceived based on largely overlapping science objectives, which have, as main celestial targets, transient and fast variable sources (down to time scales as short as fractions of a second). Catching and studying these objects typically requires the simultaneous availability of large-FoV X-/\(\gamma\)-ray instruments efficiently (i.e., with high duty cycles) monitoring the high-energy sky and either narrower field instruments providing higher sensitivity measurements in complementary energy domains (from space, as well as from the ground) or advanced detector technologies paving the way to poorly explored regions of the relevant parameter space (e.g., high-energy polarimetry, simultaneous energy-time-resolved spectroscopy, etc.). Given the largely different programmatic states of all summarized missions and the dynamic evolution of the design of at least those missions that are still in the early design and programmatic stage, providing an exhaustive comparison of their performance capabilities in different scientific fields is hardly achievable with sufficient confidence and, thus, beyond the scope of the present paper. At the time of writing, the EP is the first of the described mission to come on-line, as the launch was successfully executed on 2024 January 9 and information on the first results is expected to be publicly available soon. SVOM is planned to be the second in line, with a launch planned for June 2024. As described in the previous sections, both missions are likely to boost the number of GRBs, as well as other high-energy transients, to be discovered, characterized, and possibly followed-up in different energy domains during the next (at least) \(\sim\)5 years. The lifetime of both the EP and SVOM will significantly overlap with the scientific runs of the current generation of GW detectors, such as LIGO and VIRGO, possibly providing the discovery of electromagnetic counterparts of merging binary systems. A similar conclusion applies to the case of StarBurst, the launch of which is currently planned in 2027, and the 1-year expected duration of science operations shall match the LIGO's scheduled so-called fifth observing run. In 2027, also the installation  
Figure 21: (**Left**) Distribution of long GRBs with redshift determination in the peak isotropic luminosity versus redshift plane now (yellow points and hatched histogram) and after the nominal operation life of THESEUS (purple points and full histogram). (**Right**) A different version of the left-side figure where the GRBs discovered by THESEUS and those detected up to 2020 are displayed in a cone representing the cosmic evolution. of POLAR-2 onto the CSS is being planned, and this should bring to the community a much deeper insight into the polarization properties of GRBs, extending the outcomes of previous investigations in this domain from its predecessor, POLAR. Less certain, at present, is the path to the beginning of operations for a few more missions presented, the eXTP, Gamow, HiZ-GUNDAM, LEAP, and MoonBEAM. The advanced design state of all these missions could possibly bring them to space between the late 2020s and the early 2030s, making them largely complementary and uniquely valuable for discoveries in the field of time domain and multi-messenger astrophysics to the EP, SVOM, and StarBurst.