CMS Status and First Results

After nearly two decades of design, construction, commissioning, and preparation for physics, the CMS detector will be operated with colliding proton beams in late 2009 and much of 2010. After a short period of operation at 900 GeV center of mass energy, the LHC will have two running periods in which it will ramp up to collision energies of 7 TeV and 8-10 TeV, respectively. This will be new territory in the history of hadron colliders. In this talk I will present the readiness and performance of the CMS detector as established in several stages of commissioning, provide an overview of the CMS plan for very early physics studies and finally, I will also provide first results of the performance of CMS in pp collisions at 900 GeV and 7 TeV if they are available.