There is not a person alive today who, as a child (or as an adult, who are we kidding?), didn’t see Spider-Man scale walls and think “man, that would be cool.” Because the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) seemingly exists solely to provide the U.S. military with comic book technology, they’ve made it a reality with the Z-man program – and they’re taking cues from nature’s best Spider-Man analog, the gecko.

“The gecko is one of the champion climbers in the Animal Kingdom, so it was natural for DARPA to look to it for inspiration in overcoming some of the maneuver challenges that U.S. forces face in urban environments,” said Dr. Matt Goodman, the DARPA program manager for Z-Man. “Like many of the capabilities that the Department of Defense pursues, we saw with vertical climbing that nature had long since evolved the means to efficiently achieve it. The challenge to our performer team was to understand the biology and physics in play when geckos climb and then reverse-engineer those dynamics into an artificial system for use by humans.”

If this seems whimsical and/or impractical, think again: For soldiers in combat, taking the high ground is just as valuable now as it has been for centuries. Even children playing “king of the hill” understand this. The problem is, taking the high ground it modern urban battlefields usually involves stairs, which are easily defended/booby-trapped. The Z-man program gives soldiers the option of circumventing the stairs altogether in favor of scaling sheer surfaces.

Geckos climb using van der Waals effect, a bonding at the molecular level between the gecko’s tiny (200 nanometer) hair-like spatulae and the climbing surface. Draper Laboratory of Cambridge, Mass., who developed the technology for DARPA, was charged with replicating the adhesive property, only for much heavier humans. So far, so good – provided the user has sufficient upper body strength, tests have seen subjects climb as high as 25 feet on a vertical sheet of glass with no equipment other than two hand-held climbing paddles.

Once ready for military deployment, the Draper Labs team hopes the Z-man project technology will be used to develop reversible adhesives for potential biomedical, industrial, and consumer applications.

Spider-Man fanboys around the world likely hope for the same thing.