Title: The Future of X-Ray Astronomy Guenther Hasinger MPE, Garching Abstract: The current observational capabilities for X--ray astronomy are excellent. The two X--ray observatory work horses, NASA's Chandra and ESA's XMM-Newton, are accompanied by NASA's RXTE and Swift, ESA's Integral and the Japanese Suzaku satellite. Recently the Italian Gamma ray mission AGILE has been launched successfully and will soon be followed by NASA's GLAST mission. Both NASA an ESA are now discussing next generation X--ray observatories, Constellation--X and XEUS, respectively, which either separately or joined to a next generation global X--ray observatory, should surpass the sensitivity of the instruments on the current mayor observatories as well as the intermediate dedicated missions planned for the next decade by more than an order of magnitude. This sensitivity is well matched to future observatories in other wavebands, e.g. the Extremely Large groundbased Telescope(s) (ELT) in the optical, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) in the infrared, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA) in the submillimeter or the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) in the radio band. The time interval between large space missions in any wave band and any space agency are very long (15-25 yrs) and significant technology development is required from one step to the next. In order to maintain the scientific competitiveness and the technological expertise of research groups worldwide, as well as the excitement and career possibilities of young scientists, it is of utmost importance to develop intermediate, smaller projects like those planned in Japan, France, Italy, Germany, UK, Russia, USA and even Brasil, India and China. I will mention in some detail the revived Russian Spektrum^×Röntgen-Gamma mission, and the French/Italian/German Simbol-X mission. These missions, addressing exciting scientific topics like Dark Energy, Dark Matter and the Cosmic Web, the complete Census of obscured black holes and time variable phenomena, will hopefully be launched before 2013.