Dear Members,
I trust this missive find members both healthy and well and that you have enjoyed the MMTA international conference in Vancouver Staying with the theme of North America and defence, which featured heavily at the conference, I thought I would give you a quick update on what DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—in the US is doing in the field of metals.
As a quick refresher: DARPA is an independent research and development agency within the U.S. Department of War (DoW—formerly, Department of Defense). It was created in response to the launch of Sputnik in 1957. According to DARPA, it “stands as our nation’s commitment to never again face a strategic technical surprise.”
I believe I am correct in adding the proviso that the programs described below are only those that are public. And about which DARPA talks. There are bound to be more that are sub rosa.
Some Current Programs
DARPA provides its programs with some great (and, sometimes quite witty) acronyms. The ones I shall look at are: MAHEM, METALS, NOM4D and SURGE.
MAHEM
I particularly like the acronym for this program: it stands for Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition1. This program utilizes magnetohydrodynamics (using magnetic fields to drive fluids) to form and time multiple molten metal jets or self-forging penetrators from a single charge. And as DARPA describes it: “This approach offers superior precision, higher EFJ (Explosive Formed Jet) velocity, and increased lethality compared to traditional explosive-driven liners.” So there you go!
METALS
With a nicely down-to-earth acronym, the METALS ((Multiobjective Engineering and Testing of Alloy Structures2) program was launched to break the “one part – one material” paradigm. Traditionally, in the design and manufacture of planes, ships, vehicles and other engineered structures, every part or individual component is typically constructed from a single material. This “can lead to vulnerabilities when highly engineered components experience different local forces or environments during service. Material selection in these situations is usually a compromise.”
The program will bring together researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and Lehigh University who “… will research novel design tools for the simultaneous optimization of shape and compositional gradients in multi-material structures that complement new high-throughput materials testing techniques. They will consider an additively manufactured bladed disk (blisk), commonly found in turbomachinery such as jet and rocket engines, as an exemplary challenge problem.3
NOM4D
Another wonderfully named program is NOM4D (Novel Orbital and Moon Manufacturing, Materials, and Mass-efficient Design). Launched in early-February 2021, the program’s “vision” is ‘“ … to develop foundational materials, processes, and designs needed to realize in-space manufacturing of large, precise, and resilient Defense Department systems”’, according to Bill Carter, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.4
While, in its first two phases, the program included research into using lunar regolith (via Earth-based simulants) as a potential raw material for in-orbit manufacturing, in its current phase, it is now looking at using Earth-based metals for large-scale, in-space manufacturing. To build such things as refueling stations (for commercial or government use) and “space-based RF antennas with 100-meter or greater diameter.”5
SURGE
Finally, the SURGE (Structures Uniquely Resolved to Guarantee Endurance) program “aims to rethink the current machine-focused paradigm of part qualification in additive manufacturing (AM).”6 This roughly translates as addressing the critical bottleneck of qualifying 3D-printed metal parts for military use.
Programs of Possible Interest to MMTA Members
There are, however, several programs that may be of particular interest to MMTA members. These include: CriticalMAAS, EMBER, RPOD, SPREE and OPEN.
EMBER, RPOD and SPREE
These programs address issues around advanced extraction and separation.
Harking back to another missive I have penned on bioleaching, Environmental Microbes as a BioEngineering Resource (EMBER)7 is exploring the use of engineered microbes and biomolecules to selectively bind, separate. and purify Rare Earth Elements (REEs) from under-utilized, non-traditional domestic sources, such as phosphate mine waste, acid mine drainage and electronic waste.
Also involving REE, the Separation and Purification of Rare Earth Elements (SPREE)8 program focuses on developing environmentally sustainable and energy-efficient methods for separating individual REEs, crucial for producing high-purity materials for defense applications.
And, on the recycling front, the Recycling at the Point of Disposal (RPOD)9 program aims to develop technologies to recover efficiently critical elements, for example, gallium, germanium and other metals, from end-of-life military and civilian electronics.
OPEN
The Open Price Exploration for National security (OPEN)10 program (which I believe is still active), on the other hand, involves itself with supply chain forecasting and market transparency, in particular the creation of tools to provide transparency into the price, supply and demand for base metals, REEs and other critical materials.
The tools would provide “accurate and unbiased price, supply, and demand predictions [that] may enable better-informed decision-making by the U.S. government and investors, and boost resiliency in the face of supply chain upheaval.”11
When describing OPEN, perhaps not surprisingly, DARPA notes that “ … price, supply, and demand information for critical materials is opaque and often flawed, making it difficult for producers, consumers, and investors to know the economic value and future supply of critical materials.”
CriticalMAAS
Finally, there’s the Critical Mineral Assessments with AI Support (CriticalMAAS) program. In this initiative, DARPA has teamed up with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) to develop the use of machine learning to accelerate the identification of new domestic mineral resources.
DARPA describes the program’s goal as being the transformation of “ … the workflow from a serial, predominantly manual, intermittently updated approach, to a highly parallel, continuous AI-assisted capability that is comprehensive in scope, efficient in scale, and generalizable across an array of applications.”
Technically, the effort has four different areas: “… extracting geospatial data from maps and documents; model extraction from knowledge; mineral potential mapping exploiting multi-modal fusion; and human -in-the-loop learning and mixed-initiative learning.”
Some of the Metals Involved
In the foregoing programs, DARPA’s interest includes the following individual metals:
RPOD: gallium, germanium, indium, tantalum, neodymium, praseodymium, europium and dysprosium.
SPREE & EMBER: REEs.
OPEN: cobalt, germanium, lithium, magnesium, nickel and the REEs.
CriticalMAAS: In the 2024–2025 Pilot Assessments (Hackathons), DARPA specifically announced that CriticalMAAS conducted pilot assessments for:
- zinc, copper, and nickel (national-scale)
- Mississippi Valley Type zinc, magmatic cobalt and
nickel (Upper Midwest) - lacustrine lithium
- tungsten skarn (Alaska)
- peralkaline and carbonatite REEs (national)
- porphyry copper (regional and national).
Germanium, lithium and tin are also metals of interest to DARPA and this program
With those final three metals, I trust you’ll now leaned a little bit of what DARPA is up to … publicly. They have some fun stuff going on.
From Cleveland Heights here in Ohio,
I remain, as always
Yours
Tom
©2026 Tom Butcher
1https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/magneto-hydrodynamic-explosive-munition
2https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/multiobjective-engineering-and-testing-of-alloy-structures
3https://engineering.cmu.edu/news-events/news/2024/10/14-ai-enhanced-design-tool.html
4 https://www.darpa.mil/news/2021/orbital-construction
5https://www.darpa.mil/news/2025/novel-tech-space-structures
6 https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/structures-uniquely-resolved-guarantee-endurance
7 https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/environmental-microbes-as-a-bioengineering-resource
8 https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/spree
9 https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/recycling-at-the-point-of-disposal
10 https://www.darpa.mil/research/programs/open-price-exploration
11https://www.darpa.mil/news/2024/critical-materials-market-transparency
Cover image: DARPA by David Hoeek at Shutterstock
