The status of active or pending isn't a fact; it's a state of a Status attrbute in a dimension. Your fact should be a numeric, even if it is only a count. That way, you can do things like figuring out how many active or pending projects exist at any point in time.

The typical solution is a periodic snapshot fact table, which you elude to here by say you don't like thousands of records per year. I'm working with a customer right now who is going to have 4.1 billion records per year in their periodic snapshot fact table if that's the way they choose to go.

Another approach is to use a calculation to check all projects in each status between two points in time; this is something that Mosha calls "in flight" events: http://sqlblog.com/blogs/mosha/archive/2007/06/01/counting-in-flight-events-in-mdx.aspx.