The LHC Project: Status and Prospects

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), CERN's future major facility for high-energy physics, has entered into the construction and preparation for installation phases. After recalling briefly the main machine design choices and challenges, one will review the progress of civil works for the machine and experimental areas and the status of the main LHC components, which are presently series-built and for some of them procured in kind through world-wide collaborations. Report will also be given on the full-scale prototype of an elementary LHC lattice cell, called String 2, which is being commissioned and used for optimising the installation and testing procedures of the LHC. The size and duration of the LHC Project, its intrinsic complexity and the large number of world-wide collaborations involved require rather elaborate project management tools, which will be shortly described. Finally, following the extended running of the LEP and the delay for emptying of the machine tunnel, a new planning for project completion had to be established and will be presented, which aims at a first physics run in 2006.