A former Air Force intelligence officer pleaded guilty last week to lying to law enforcement when she falsely accused her estranged wife — who is an astronaut — of illegally accessing her bank account from space.
Summer Heather Worden, 50, faces up to five years in prison and up to a $250,000 dollar fine.
It is the end of a yearslong, bitter legal dispute between Ms. Worden, a decorated intelligence officer in the Air Force, and Anne McClain, a West Point graduate and Iraq War veteran who joined NASA in 2013. Ms. Worden’s allegations, which she made in 2019 while Ms. McClain was on the International Space Station, were the first allegation of a crime in space.
Ms. Worden accused Ms. McClain of guessing her password to illegally access her personal bank account from space in January 2019, a claim that sparked inquiries from the Federal Trade Commission and NASA’s Inspector General.
Federal investigators later found that Ms. Worden had, in fact, given Ms. McClain access to her accounts since 2015 as part of the couple’s intertwined finances.
In an indictment unsealed in April 2020, prosecutors accused Ms. Worden of lying about when she first opened her personal account and when she first changed her login credentials.
Ms. McClain has stated since the allegations first emerged that she had permission to access Ms. Worden’s accounts, and was merely managing the couple’s finances with the full knowledge of her estranged spouse.
An aviator with more than 2,000 flight hours on various aircraft, Ms. McClane returned to the International Space Station in March 2025 as commander of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-10 mission. She returned to Earth in August.
Ms. Worden will be sentenced on Feb. 12, 2026.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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