Over the next few years, Rosing and the LCO staff came to understand that a network composed of many smaller telescopes would provide greater observing capacity.

After completion of the construction and installation of these telescopes, LCO began its transition to operating a global observatory.

The goal of this program is to prepare this community to carry out effective research following discoveries being made by current and future time domain astronomy surveys.

During 2017, a set of high-resolution (R = 50,000), high-stability spectrographs (NRES) were deployed to four of the LCO sites to be coupled by optical fibres to the 1 meter telescopes.

Data are returned to LCO headquarters, where they are processed to remove instrumental signature and ingested into an archive.

The entire U.S. astronomical community gained access to the LCO network in 2016 as a result of an award from the National Science Foundation's Mid-Scale Innovation Program.

The design and operation of the LCO global telescope network provide the unique capabilities required for time domain astronomy.

The LCO network has been used to study supernovae and other explosive transients; exoplanets, through observations of both transits and microlensing; asteroids; and AGN variability.

In 2017 LCO played a critical part in two major discoveries: first visible counterpart of a gravitational wave event,[7][8] and a new type of supernova with successive explosions.

In 2019 there are 20 LCO Global Sky Partners[12] based in the US, Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, Australia, or running entirely online programs, for students, teachers, and the wider public.

In 2019 the reported direct impact of the program was 13,000 individuals exclusively using the LCO 0.4-meter network,[13] predominantly school children and teachers.

Recent successful programs include Asteroid Tracker,[15] Agent Exoplanet,[16] and Serol's Cosmic Explorers.