AAWSAP DIRD, Aerospace Applications of Programmable Matter, December 2009

This Defense Intelligence Reference Document, DIA-08-0911-016, is dated 14 December 2009. It was prepared by the Defense Warning Office's Acquisition Support Division at the Defense Intelligence Agency and is one of a series of FY 2009 advanced technology reports under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications program. It is a primer on programmable matter and smart materials such as quantum dots, metamaterials and liquid crystals, and on how they could manage heat and energy and provide camouflage on spacecraft. It concludes that the possible gains would be significant and well worth pursuing.

From the source: Release of 2026-09-18 Incident: 12/14/09, Las Vegas, Nevada. Released with redactions. This document is a Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD), a technical reference format used by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to capture baseline knowledge on a specific topic for later analytic use. DIRDs are best understood as reference and synthesis products rather than as original research. It is one of 38 DIRDs produced under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program (AAWSAP) between 2009 and 2011. Because AAWSAP’s scope permitted a broad range of supporting topics, not every DIRD in the series directly concerns aerospace systems or future threat assessment. The following summary reflects the DIRD’s scope and framing at the time of writing and should not be read as implying current validation of the concepts discussed. This DIRD describes “programmable matter” as smart materials whose properties can be changed on command, potentially allowing spacecraft components to change function through software updates rather than physical repair or replacement. The report suggests that such materials could someday enable adjustable sensors, smart windows, heat control, energy collection, active camouflage, and systems that switch between different functions, making spacecraft more flexible and adaptable. At the same time, it presents the idea as highly speculative and emphasizes major technical obstacles, including manufacturing at extremely small scales, shielding against radiation and electromagnetic interference, managing temperature effects, reducing component failures, and preventing hacking or malicious control. Overall, the document presents programmable matter as a promising long-term concept over the next 50 years, while judging that simpler near-term uses such as smart windows and energy-saving surface materials are far more realistic than the more ambitious aerospace applications.

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" Impossible" Materials
When natural materials are shaped and combined in macroscopic ways, it becomes
possible to produce what Roger Bacon described as "natural magic": devices such as
mirrors, lenses, polarizers, magnets, wires, semiconductors, fluorescent dyes, and
phosphorescent screens that glow in the dark. We take these devices for granted, but
to our primitive ancestors they would have seemed supernatural, as indeed they are in
the sense of not occurring naturally.
However, by combining the same materials in nanostructured ways, we achieve a
higher order of magic: Bragg mirrors that reflect a single wavelength while transmitting
all others, superlenses that defy Newton's diffraction limit to focus with unnatural
sharpness, superstrong magnets that measure the world around them with
unprecedented sensitivity, photoluminescent materials that absorb light in a broad
range of wavelengths and re-emit it in a single brilliant color. Soon we may have high
temperature superconductors and even materials that are functionally invisible.
One such "impossible" material hypothesized is the nanostructured "metapolarizer."
Where classical polarizers either reflect or absorb half the light that hits them (typically
resulting in energy wastage of SO percent or higher), a metapolarizer simply ignores
one polarity of light and converts or rotates or "retards" the other. This principle can be
harnessed, for example, to double the battery life of a laptop display or to double the
brightness of a flat-screen TV.
However, even these magical materials are "static"; that is, their properties are fixed at
the time of manufacture. The greatest revolution in materials science may in fact come
from materials capable of changing their properties on demand.
Advantages of Dynamic Materials
Leaving behind the world of static materials, we come to a sort of programmable magic
whose fruits already include switchable mirrors, dynamic optical filters, deformable
lenses, magnets and polarizers that appear and disappear on command. Less
glamorous but equally important are such "behind the scenes" capabilities as tunable
electrical conductivity, tunable bandgap semiconductors, tunable lasers, and tunable
photonic crystals.
However, the ultimate exemplar of designer materials will be multifunctional smart
materials, which are capable not only of switching a particular property on and off but
of changing their properties-indeed, their very purpose-on demand.
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