is an ambitious program to conduct a survey to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios for up to a million stars using the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO), over the period 2003 - 2010. The survey represents a giant leap forward in our understanding of our own Milky Way galaxy, providing a vast stellar kinematic database larger than any other survey proposed for this coming decade. The main data product will be a southern hemisphere survey of about a million stars. This survey would comprise 0.7 million thin disk main sequence stars, 250,000 thick disk stars, 100,000 bulge and halo stars, and a further 50,000 giant stars including some out to 10 kpc from the Sun. RAVE will offer the first truly representative inventory of stellar radial velocities for all major components of the Galaxy. Its completeness and homogeneity will make it an invaluable stand-alone resource, but its full potential will be realised when the radial velocities are combined with proper motions and parallaxes from other sources (USNO, Tycho).