Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images
Accusations floated, truth landed back on Earth.
A woman from Kansas has been found guilty of lying about her ex-wife committing a crime from space. Summer Worden, who used to work as an Air Force Intelligence officer, accused NASA astronaut Anne McClain of breaking into her bank account while McClain was working at the International Space Station back in 2019.
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According to Unilad, Worden made the accusation in July 2019 when McClain was halfway through a six-month mission in space. She said that McClain figured out her password and got into her bank account without permission in January 2019. At the time, the two women were still married. Worden used her intelligence training to ask the bank where the login came from, and they told her it was from a computer network that belonged to NASA.
The claim got a lot of attention because it would have been the first crime ever committed in space. The Federal Trade Commission and NASA’s Inspector General both started looking into what happened. But McClain’s lawyers said she didn’t do anything wrong. They explained that Worden had let McClain check their family money, especially since they were raising a child together.
Things between them were already pretty messy
The investigation showed that the two women were fighting over custody of Worden’s son. The boy was born a year before Worden even met McClain. Even though they got married at the end of 2014, Worden wouldn’t let McClain adopt him. Then in 2018, while they were still married, McClain asked a Houston court to give her shared parenting rights. She told the court that Worden was making bad choices with money.
When investigators looked closer at the bank account story, they found out that Worden wasn’t telling the truth. They discovered that Worden opened the account in 2018 and both women could use it until January 2019, which is when Worden changed the password.
The people prosecuting the case say that Worden had actually given McClain permission to look at bank records going back to 2015. McClain said she only checked the accounts to keep track of their shared money and that Worden knew about it the whole time.
The timing of when Worden went to the police looked pretty suspicious too. The couple was already dealing with legal problems and fighting over their son when Worden made her report. This made investigators wonder if she was trying to use the accusation to help her case. The whole situation became one of NASA’s strangest controversies, getting a lot of public attention at a time when the space agency was already dealing with other issues.
Worden has now admitted to lying to law enforcement, according to US Attorney Nicholas J. Ganjei of the Southern District of Texas. A judge named Alfred Bennett accepted her guilty plea on November 13, and she’ll be sentenced on February 12 next year.
She could spend up to five years in federal prison and pay a fine of up to $250,000 for making up the story about the well-respected NASA astronaut. For now, she’s allowed to stay out of jail until her sentencing hearing happens.
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Author: 360 Technology Group
Published: Nov 20, 2025 03:15 pm