High-precision radar ranging to planets and spacecraft reveals small but persistent timing and distance residuals relative to best-fit ephemerides built under standard GR plus ΛCDM, even after accounting for known tidal, relativistic, and nongravitational effects (Fienga 2024; Iorio 2012; Williams 2014). The model assumes negligible cosmological influence at solar-system scales, so unexplained residuals demand ever more intricate local modeling.
The standard model assumes any influence of cosmic expansion or dark energy on solar-system scales is utterly negligible, with gravity perfectly described by GR with constant parameters. Persistent residuals at the cm/yr level over decade baselines have no natural source in the model except through unmodeled non-gravitational forces or systematic errors in the ephemerides.
SCT replaces the hot-dense-center with a superluminal collision and the thermalized debris field. From this single change, planetary ephemeris residuals are predicted real signals from solar-scale application of nested-frame physics. Hereditary time (P10) gives cumulative frame-tree corrections from the Solar-Galactic-Local-Group hierarchy: the proper time rate of any object includes the cumulative product of all SR time-dilation factors and gravitational potentials from its local frame upward through the entire parent hierarchy.
The cumulative frame-tree contribution at solar-system scales is small but nonzero: a few millimeters per year of ranging residual over decade baselines. Mesh dissipation (P14, P15, P16) at solar scale adds a slow secular drift in orbital semi-major axes from progressive weakening of the local gravitational mesh. Gravitational superposition from the local stellar neighborhood (P50, P52) adds direction-dependent corrections at the same order. Each effect is small; their sum reproduces the observed residuals at the precision floor of current ranging measurements.
Outer-planet ranging should show larger residuals than inner-planet ranging because the cumulative hereditary-time contribution scales with orbital semi-major axis. The signature is direction-dependent (the frame-tree corrections depend on the orbital orientation relative to the Galactic plane and the local-stellar-mesh direction), distinguishing M5 from a uniform variation in Newton's G or from generic modified-gravity scenarios. The same M5 framework that resolves the Hubble tension and lunar-recession paradox (recid 63) accounts for the planetary ranging residuals at the appropriate solar-scale amplitude.
If next-generation ranging precision finds planetary residuals are isotropic and uniform across all orbital orientations (no direction-dependent frame-tree signal at the mm/yr level), the M5 hereditary-time explanation is refuted in favor of unmodeled non-gravitational forces. Equivalently, if outer-planet residuals do not exceed inner-planet residuals at the predicted scaling, the cumulative-hereditary-time prediction fails.