Back in 2019, the world briefly believed we officially had our very first space crime on our hands, likely the first of many to come in the centuries ahead. It was going to be a tawdry tale of identity theft while in orbit, mixed with a splash of custody battle drama, and all of it, uh, orbiting NASA’s first planned all-female spacewalk.
Five years later, it’s, unfortunately, very much an earthly crime drama, but it’s still dramatic. CNBC reports that Summer Worden, a former Air Force intelligence officer, has pleaded guilty to lying to federal investigators about her astronaut wife accessing her bank account from the International Space Station.
Astronaut Annie McClain is a West Point grad, an Iraq War vet, and future SpaceX Crew-10 commander. Worden has accused McClain of cracking her password while floating 250 miles above the planet and peeking into her finances during their separation. This was happening as McClain was gearing up for a history-making spacewalk. The mission was eventually, and very anticlimactically, postponed because NASA didn’t have enough spacesuits in the right size. That’s not a joke. A tailoring issue or perhaps a shipping mishap is the reason a historic spaceflight did not occur. Worden brought her accusations to both the FTC and NASA’s Office of Inspector General.
The big problem is that the story didn’t add up. Investigators found that Worden had opened the bank account months after she claimed McClain had accessed it without permission, and that McClain had been using shared login credentials the couple had both relied on for years. Worden had even granted her spouse access as far back as 2015. In other words, the supposed “space crime” was just a messy Earthbound divorce.
McClain denied any wrongdoing at the time, noting that she was keeping tabs on the family finances from orbit, which is simultaneously mundane and surreal. Worden was finally charged in 2020 for making false statements, with additional fraud charges tied to an unrelated Texas land deal piling on in 2022. Prosecutors have now agreed to drop the extra charges in exchange for her guilty plea to the lies told to federal agencies. She faces up to five years in prison, a $250,000 fine, and restitution payments to investors in the separate property scheme.
Her sentencing is scheduled for February 2026.
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