ΛCDM N-body simulations predict that a Milky Way-mass dark-matter halo should host hundreds of dark-matter subhalos massive enough to form visible satellite galaxies. Only about 50 satellites are observed around the Milky Way, despite improving census completeness. The most massive predicted subhalos are "too big to fail" to host visible galaxies on standard galaxy-formation grounds, yet they are not seen (Boylan-Kolchin 2011; Bullock & Boylan-Kolchin 2017).
The standard model assumes the dark-matter subhalo population around a host galaxy directly determines the satellite-galaxy population through standard galaxy-formation physics. Hundreds of subhalos should produce dozens to hundreds of visible satellites; the observed count is far below that prediction. The most massive subhalos in particular cannot be explained away by reionization or feedback. They are too big to fail to host stars.
SCT replaces the hot-dense-center with a superluminal collision and the thermalized debris field that became our visible universe. Along the way, it eliminates the dark-matter particle and therefore the dark-matter subhalo population. There are no subhalos to count, because the entire subhalo framework is an artifact of the hot-dense-center origin's requirement that all gravitational structure be built from particle dark matter. SCT does not have that requirement.
Instead, the satellite-galaxy population around the Milky Way is determined by collision-cascade debris geometry. When the Milky Way's parent collision deposited the proto-galactic structure that became our Galaxy, it also deposited a population of smaller fragment overdensities (cascade products at appropriate scales for satellite-galaxy formation) arranged geometrically around the parent overdensity (P34). The satellite count we observe is the natural output of this cascade-fragment population, set by collision geometry rather than by counting subhalos in a halo that does not exist.
The actual satellite count of approximately 50 is consistent with collision-fragment expectations for a Milky Way-class progenitor. The "missing" 200 to 500 subhalos that ΛCDM predicts simply do not exist, because the framework that predicted them does not apply. The Too-Big-To-Fail problem dissolves identically: the most massive predicted subhalos are massive in the simulations because the simulations overpopulate the high-mass end of the subhalo function from random Gaussian initial conditions. SCT does not predict that population at all, so there is nothing to fail.
This is one of the most direct dividends of the toggle from hot-dense-center to superluminal-collision-and-thermalized-debris-field. An entire class of "missing" structures that have generated decades of theoretical work to explain stop being missing because they were never predicted to exist in the first place. The observed satellite count, the Vast Polar Structure of co-rotating satellites (r130, M3), the M31 satellite plane (r131), the Centaurus A coherent satellite system (r134) all find natural explanations in the cascade-fragment framework with shared angular-momentum inheritance, and none of them requires the DM subhalo population that does not exist.
If precision lensing or dynamical-perturbation studies of the Milky Way halo confirm the presence of massive "dark" subhalos (gravitational potential-well structures consistent with ΛCDM subhalo predictions) that have failed to produce visible satellite galaxies, the M4 cascade-fragment-only framework is refuted. The next generation of stellar-stream gap analyses (DESI + Gaia DR4) is well-positioned to test this directly.