The Commandant’s Permission Requirement at 33 CFR § 66.01-1 Provides That No Person Shall Establish and Maintain Any Aid to Maritime Navigation Without First Obtaining Permission, the Moon Has Aided Maritime Navigation for at Least Four Millennia, No Coast Guard Form CG-2554 Has Ever Been Filed on Its Behalf, Its Height Above Water Is 238,855 Miles, Its Characteristic, a Flashing Cycle of 29.53 Days Culminating in Total Extinguishment, Conforms to No System of Aids to Navigation, It Appears in None of the Seven Volumes of the Coast Guard Light List, It Is Discontinued Without the Thirty Days’ Notice Required by Section 66.01-25 Approximately Twelve Times Per Year, Lunar Eclipses Extinguish It Entirely for Up to Nearly Two Hours Without a Notice to Mariners, the Federal Government Itself Publishes Daily Tables Telling Mariners When It Will Appear, and the Largest Aid to Navigation in American Waters Has Never Held a Permit

I. The Permission Requirement

Title 33 of the Code of Federal Regulations governs navigation and navigable waters. Part 66 governs private aids to navigation. Section 66.01-1(a), the basic provision of the subpart, provides: “No person, public body, or instrumentality not under the control of the Commandant, exclusive of the Armed Forces, will establish and maintain, discontinue, change or transfer ownership of any aid to maritime navigation, without first obtaining permission to do so from the Commandant.”¹

The provision is categorical. It contains no minimum size for the aid. It contains no maximum distance from shore. It contains no exception for an aid the applicant did not build, an aid the applicant cannot reach, or an aid that was already operating before the regulation was promulgated in 1968. It asks a single functional question: is the thing an aid to maritime navigation, and did anyone obtain permission?

For the purposes of the subpart, the regulation continues, the term “private aids to navigation” includes all marine aids to navigation operated in the navigable waters of the United States other than those operated by the Federal Government.² The Coast Guard’s own statute, 14 U.S.C. § 541, authorizes the service to establish, maintain, and operate aids to maritime navigation in order to aid navigation and to prevent disasters, collisions, and wrecks of vessels and aircraft.³ The statutory purpose is not decorative. It is the prevention of wrecks.

II. The Aid

The aid under review is the moon. Its mean distance from the Earth is 238,855 miles. Its diameter is 2,159 miles. At full phase it presents an apparent magnitude of −12.74, the brightest object in the night sky, more than 1,600 times brighter than Venus at its brightest, and delivers an illuminance of approximately 0.05 to 0.3 lux to the Earth’s surface on a clear night.⁴ It is visible, without optical aid, from every navigable water on the planet.

Its service record is the longest of any aid to navigation known. Polynesian navigators settled the Pacific using the rising and setting positions of the stars, the sun, and the moon. The lunar distance method, by which a mariner determined longitude from the measured angular distance between the moon and a reference star, was published in the Nautical Almanac beginning in 1767 and remained in working use until the marine chronometer displaced it in the nineteenth century.⁵ The United States Naval Observatory still publishes daily lunar data, including moonrise and moonset, in the Nautical Almanac. The United States Naval Academy restored celestial navigation to its curriculum in the mid-2010s, and the moon remains on the syllabus. No permitted buoy, beacon, or daymark has a service record remotely comparable. The moon has aided navigation for at least four thousand years, and arguably for the entire history of seafaring.

It is, by every functional measure, an aid to maritime navigation. Mariners have navigated by it, do navigate by it, and are instructed by the federal government in how to navigate by it.

III. The Application That Was Never Filed

Section 66.01-5 prescribes the application procedure. To establish and maintain a private aid to navigation, the applicant must apply to the Commander of the Coast Guard District in which the aid is or will be located, on Form CG-2554, the Private Aids to Navigation Application. The applicant must supply the proposed position of the aid by two or more horizontal angles, bearings and distance; the time and dates during which it is proposed to operate the aid; the necessity for the aid; and, for lights, the color, characteristic, height above water, and description of illuminating apparatus.⁶

No such application has ever been filed for the moon. The archives contain no CG-2554 bearing its name, and no District Commander has ever granted permission for its establishment.

Completing the form would present difficulties. The proposed position by bearings and distance is straightforward enough in the bearings and impossible in the district: the aid is not located in any Coast Guard district, and the Commandant’s delegation of permitting authority to the District Commanders under § 66.01-3 extends only to the confines of their respective districts.⁷ The height above water is 238,855 miles, a figure for which the form’s field was not designed. The description of the illuminating apparatus would have to name the sun, a third party that did not sign the application and cannot be compelled to maintain the apparatus. The color is variable gray. The characteristic is uncharted. The necessity for the aid, the one field the applicant could complete without embarrassment, is total: four millennia of mariners cannot be wrong about necessity, and the regulation does not grade on a curve.

The difficulty of the paperwork does not excuse its absence. The regulation contains no impossibility exception.

IV. The Light List That Omits It

The Coast Guard publishes the Light List in seven volumes covering the Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the Pacific coast, the Great Lakes, and the inland rivers. Every federal aid and every permitted private aid appears in it, each with a Light List number, a position, a characteristic, and a nominal range. The mariner consulting the Light List for the brightest light in the night sky will search all seven volumes in vain. The moon has no Light List number. It has no charted position. It has no published characteristic and no nominal range.

This is not a clerical oversight. Inclusion in the Light List follows permission. Permission was never sought. The omission is the predictable administrative consequence of operating outside the permit regime: the aid that files nothing is listed nowhere, and the mariner who relies on it does so without the government’s published assurance that it will be there.

V. The Characteristic That Conforms to Nothing

Section 66.01-10 provides that the characteristics of a private aid to navigation shall conform to the United States Aids to Navigation System, the IALA-B system under which a light is published with a defined characteristic such as Fl(2) 10s, two flashes every ten seconds, with a stated color, period, and nominal range.⁸

The moon’s characteristic is a cycle of 29.53 days, progressing from total extinguishment through increasing illumination to full brilliance of −12.74 magnitude and back to extinguishment. No characteristic in the United States Aids to Navigation System has a period measured in weeks. No published characteristic includes a phase in which the aid is simply gone. A mariner expecting the aid on a published schedule, the way the Light List publishes every permitted light, would find the aid absent roughly half the time and would have no publication to consult for its return, other than the Nautical Almanac, which is published by a different agency and carries no Light List number.

VI. The Discontinuances Without Notice

Section 66.01-25 governs discontinuance. A private aid to navigation not required by statute or regulation may be discontinued and removed by the owner only after thirty days’ notice to the District Commander to whom the original request for authorization was submitted.⁹ The notice requirement exists so that mariners who have come to rely on an aid are warned before it goes dark.

The moon discontinues itself approximately 12.4 times per year. Each new moon is a discontinuance: the aid goes dark for several days and returns without notice. In four and a half billion years of operation, thirty days’ notice has never once been given. No District Commander has ever received the required notification, which is unsurprising, since no District Commander has jurisdiction and no original request for authorization was ever submitted.

Lunar eclipses compound the violation. Approximately two lunar eclipses occur each year, during which the Earth’s shadow extinguishes the aid entirely for up to nearly two hours. No Notice to Mariners is issued. No Local Notice to Mariners carries the discontinuance. The aid simply goes dark, in the middle of the night, while vessels are underway relying on it, and returns without explanation.

VII. The Federal Double Standard

The federal government is the aid’s largest user. The United States Naval Observatory, an agency of the Department of Defense, publishes the Nautical Almanac with daily lunar data used for celestial navigation. The government instructs midshipmen in the aid’s use. The government has never sought a permit for it.

Meanwhile, 14 U.S.C. § 541 authorizes the Coast Guard to establish aids to maritime navigation, but limits the establishment of non-electronic aids to the United States, the waters above the Continental Shelf, the territories and possessions, and places where American naval or military bases are or may be located.¹⁰ The Coast Guard has established no aid at 238,855 miles. It could not: the statute does not reach there. The result is a jurisdictional paradox of the government’s own making. The service charged with preventing wrecks through aids to navigation lacks the authority to permit the oldest and most widely used aid in existence, and the aid operates anyway, unpermitted, unimproved, and uninspected.

Section 66.01-20 provides for inspection of private aids. No inspection of the moon has ever been conducted. Its illuminating apparatus, the sun, has never been examined for compliance. Its characteristic has never been verified against the United States Aids to Navigation System, because it conforms to nothing.

VIII. The Defense

The objections are obvious and must be stated plainly, because the genre of honest inquiry requires that the defense be heard before it is overruled.

First, the moon was not “established” by any person. It accreted from the debris of a planetary collision approximately 4.5 billion years ago, long before there were persons, before there was a Coast Guard, and before there was a Code of Federal Regulations. One cannot obtain permission retroactively for an act no one committed.

Second, the moon is not “maintained” by anyone. It requires no maintenance. It has operated without servicing for its entire existence, which is more than can be said for any permitted aid.

Third, it is not operated in the navigable waters of the United States. It is operated, if that is the word, in cislunar space, which is not within any Coast Guard district and not within the navigable waters of anything.

Fourth, it reflects light rather than emitting it. The illuminating apparatus is the sun. The moon is, strictly speaking, a reflector, and Part 66 was written with buoys, beacons, and daymarks in mind, not celestial bodies.

Fifth, the penalty statute itself is geographically bounded. Section 542 reaches aids established “in or adjacent to the waters subject to the jurisdiction of the United States” or “on the high seas” by a person subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.¹³ The moon is in none of those places, and no person subject to any jurisdiction established it.

The defense is eloquent, and it fails on the text. The regulation says “any aid to maritime navigation.” It contains no celestial-body exception. It contains no natural-formation exception. It contains no exception for aids that were operating before 1968. Section 66.01-40, the exemptions section, exempts structures on the Outer Continental Shelf and the lighting of bridges over navigable waters.¹¹ The moon is neither a bridge nor an Outer Continental Shelf structure, and the list is exclusive.

A wreck buoy marks a hazard it did not create, and it is still an aid to navigation. A reflector buoy returns another light’s beam and is still an aid to navigation. The regulation asks one functional question: does the thing aid maritime navigation? The moon aids maritime navigation more than any permitted buoy ever has, by a margin measurable in millennia. The absence of an owner is a paperwork problem for the Coast Guard, not a defense for the aid. Section 66.01-55 even contemplates the transfer of ownership of a private aid, which presupposes that ownership can be held. The Coast Guard is invited to identify the owner and serve the paperwork.

IX. The Penalty

Section 66.01-45 provides the consequence: any person who establishes, erects, or maintains any aid to maritime navigation without first obtaining authority from the Coast Guard, or who violates the regulations relative thereto, is subject to the provisions of 14 U.S.C. § 83.¹² That section, renumbered in 2018 as 14 U.S.C. § 542 and titled “Unauthorized aids to maritime navigation; penalty,” provides: “No person, or public body, or instrumentality, excluding the armed services, shall establish, erect, or maintain any aid to maritime navigation” without first obtaining authority from the Coast Guard. “Whoever violates the provisions of this section or any of the regulations issued by the Secretary in accordance herewith shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be fined not more than $1,500 for each offense. Each day during which such violation continues shall be considered as a new offense.”¹³

The arithmetic is straightforward. The aid has operated without a permit for approximately 4.5 billion years, or roughly 1.65 trillion days. At $1,500 per day, the accumulated fine is approximately $2.5 quadrillion. The violation continues as of publication. Each night the fine grows by another $1,500, and the aid shows no sign of coming into compliance.

Collection may present practical difficulties. The Coast Guard has other priorities, presumably. But the statute does not grade on collectability, and the regulation does not contain a too-big-to-fine exception.

X. Conclusion

The evidence is internally consistent and sourced to the regulation’s own text. Under 33 CFR § 66.01-1, no person may establish and maintain any aid to maritime navigation without the Commandant’s permission. The moon is an aid to maritime navigation: it has guided mariners for millennia, it is published in the Nautical Almanac, and it is taught at the Naval Academy. No Form CG-2554 has ever been filed. No District Commander has jurisdiction. Its characteristic conforms to no system. It is discontinued without notice a dozen times a year and eclipsed without notice twice more. It appears in no volume of the Light List. The government that requires the permit is the aid’s most devoted user.

The Coast Guard requires permission for a private buoy marking a marina entrance. It should require permission for the light by which every marina entrance has been found, on clear nights, since before there were marinas.

Ergo.