NASA astronaut Anne McClain is rescued from the SpaceX Dragon Endurance spacecraft aboard the SpaceX recovery vessel Shannon, along with NASA astronaut Nicole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Kirill Peskov, after landing in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of San Diego, California, on August 9, 2025.
NASA | Getty Images
Prosecutors in Houston, Texas, announced Friday that a former Air Force intelligence officer has pleaded guilty to lying to federal officials by falsely claiming that his estranged astronaut wife illegally accessed his bank account during a six-month stay on the International Space Station.
Summer Warden, 50, entered a guilty plea Thursday, more than five years after she was charged in a space lawsuit with lying about the conduct of her wife, Ann McClain, a U.S. Army colonel, West Point graduate and Iraq war veteran, with whom she was in the middle of a divorce.
The allegations come at a time when Worden said the couple was in a custody battle over her then-six-year-old son, who was conceived through IVF and carried by a surrogate mother.
Worden’s trial in the case was scheduled to begin next Monday in Houston federal court.
The Kansas woman is accused of making false statements about McCain to NASA’s Office of Inspector General and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging that McCain committed identity theft.
In a statement titled “Far Out,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said in July that Ms. Worden alleged that her estranged spouse “guessed her password and illegally accessed her bank accounts while she was deployed to the International Space Station.”
“However, Mr. Warden actually opened the account in April 2018,” the office said. “Both parties had access until Mr. Worden changed his credentials in January 2019.”
“The investigation revealed that Mr. Warden had given his spouse access to his banking records, including login credentials, since at least 2015,” the statement said.
At the time of the trespassing allegations, McClain was preparing for what NASA called the first all-female spacewalk, but the mission was later canceled because NASA did not have enough spacesuits to fit the astronauts.
McClain’s lawyer told the New York Times in 2019 that McClain checked the accounts to monitor his family’s finances and was not informed by Worden that he could not access the accounts.
McClain was on the space station from December 2018 to June 2019.
She most recently led the SpaceX Crew-10 crew mission to the space station from March to August of this year.
Worden is free on bail and is scheduled to be sentenced on February 12th.
She could be sentenced to up to five years in prison.
CNBC has reached out to Worden and McClain’s attorneys for comment.
