The Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) is a new instrument developed for the Hubble Space Telescope planned for installation during the next shuttle mission to the Hubble (SM4) in 2008. It is designed for high throughput, medium resolution (R=20,000) spectroscopy of point sources, allowing the efficient observation of numerous faint extragalactic and galactic ultraviolet (1150-3000 A) targets. The primary science objectives of the mission are the study of the origins of large-scale structure in the universe, the formation and evolution of galaxies, and the origin of stellar and planetary systems and the cold interstellar medium. The instrument has been designed with maximum effective area as the primary constraint, and will provide more than an order of magnitude gain in sensitivity over previous HST instruments in this wavelength region.