Lunar laser ranging measures the Moon receding at 3.82 ± 0.07 cm/yr. Extrapolated backward with constant tidal friction, that rate puts the Moon at Earth's surface ~1.5 Gyr ago, against a 4.4+ Gyr system age (Dickey 1994; Williams 2014). Geophysics resolves it with time-varying ocean dissipation tuned to deep-time proxies, but the standard framework gives the drift no larger context.
The standard model assumes cosmology contributes nothing measurable inside the solar system and, more deeply, that secular orbital evolution has no unified physics: the Moon's drift, the loosening of star clusters, and the apparent acceleration of the universe are filed as three unrelated problems with three unrelated mechanisms. Each scale gets its own bespoke model and no scale informs another.
SCT's answer here is deliberately modest, and that is the point. The Moon's outward drive is tidal; SCT adds no mesh term to the 3.82 cm/yr, and the extrapolation paradox dissolves exactly the way geophysics dissolves it, through resonance-dependent ocean dissipation. What SCT changes is the drift's significance: lunar laser ranging supplies the observational anchor for the bottom rung of a single scale-free orbital-decay law.
The law is the Exponential Orbital Decay Law of Paper 11, From Chaos to Covariant Completeness: Λ_parent(t) = Λ_parent(t₀) exp[-α(t - t₀)], whose exponential form is derived from the scale-free property of gravitational N-body dynamics (P14) and whose rate α is observationally constrained at each scale. Lunar laser ranging fixes α_solar at roughly 2 × 10⁻¹² per year; cluster velocity-dispersion evolution fixes α_cluster at roughly H₀. One functional form holds across twelve orders of magnitude in system scale. Paper 7, From Chaos To Cosmic Expansion, runs the full sweep its subtitle promises, from tidal recession to cosmic acceleration: the same secular weakening the Moon writes in centimeters per year, clusters write in their dispersions, and the universe writes as apparent expansion through the hereditary time chain (P15, P16, P18).
Two premises carry the whole structure: P14 supplies the universal decay family and P15 converts parent-frame weakening into what embedded observers measure. The lunar case needs nothing further, which is why it anchors everything else.
The exposed claim is cross-scale consistency. If precision ephemeris and lunar-laser-ranging analysis finds a secular non-tidal residual incompatible with α_solar ~ 2 × 10⁻¹² per year, or if cluster velocity-dispersion evolution yields a decay rate that breaks the single exponential form connecting solar and cluster scales at >3σ, the M5 hierarchy loses its anchor. A fully-closed tidal budget does not threaten SCT; a broken rate ladder does.