The GE0600 laser interferometric gravitational wave detector is approaching the end of its commissioning phase which started in 1995. During a test run in January 2002 the detector was operated for 15 days in a power-recycled michelson configuration. The detector and environmental data which were acquired during this test run were used to test the data analysis code. This paper describes the subsystems of GE0600: the status of the detector by August 2002 and the plans towards the first science run. © 2003 SPIE