NASA astronaut Anne McClain is helped out of SpaceX’s Dragon Endurance spacecraft aboard SpaceX’s SHANNON recovery ship after she, NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers, JAXA (Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) astronaut Takuya Onishi and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov land in the Pacific Ocean on August 9, 2025 off the coast from San Diego, California.
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A former Air Force intelligence officer pleaded guilty to lying to a federal agent by falsely claiming that his ex-astronaut wife illegally accessed his bank account while she was aboard the International Space Station for six months, prosecutors in Houston, Texas, said Friday.
The guilty plea Thursday by Summer Worden, 50, comes more than five years after she was accused in the space case of lying about the actions of her wife, Anne McClain, a U.S. Army colonel, West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran, while they were in the middle of a divorce.
The claim came at a time when Worden said the couple was involved in a custody battle over Worden’s then-6-year-old son, who had been conceived through in vitro fertilization and carried by a surrogate mother.
Worden’s trial in the case was scheduled to begin next Monday in federal court in Houston.
The Kansas resident was accused of making false statements about McClain to the NASA Office of Inspector General and the Federal Trade Commission, where she alleged that McCain had committed identity theft.
Worden in July “alleged that his former spouse had guessed his password and illegally accessed his bank account while his spouse was deployed to the International Space Station,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said in a statement titled “Far Out” on Friday.
“However, Worden opened the account in April 2018,” the office said. “Both parties had accessed it until January 2019, when Worden changed credentials.”
“The investigation revealed that Worden had granted his spouse access to his banking records from at least 2015, including his login credentials,” the statement said.
At the time of the alleged break-in, McClain was preparing for what NASA billed as the first all-female spacewalk, which was later scrapped because the agency did not have enough spacesuits for the astronauts.
McClain’s lawyer told The New York Times in 2019 that he had verified the account to monitor the family’s finances and that Worden had never told him he couldn’t access the account.
McClain was aboard the Space Station from December 2018 to June 2019.
He recently commanded the SpaceX Crew-10 manned mission to the Space Station from March of this year until August.
Worden, who remains free on bail, will be sentenced on February 12.
He faces a maximum possible sentence of up to five years in prison.
CNBC has requested comment from lawyers for Worden and McClain.
