A former Air Force Intelligence officer pleaded guilty last week to lying to federal authorities about her estranged astronaut spouse illegally accessing her bank account while deployed to the International Space Station (ISS).  

The space case reaches back to 2019, when astronaut Anne McClain — a U.S. Army colonel, West Point graduate, and Iraq war combat veteran — was preparing for the first all-female spacewalk in history.

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It was around that time that her wife Summer Heather Worden claimed that McClain guessed her password and accessed her bank account without authorization.

The couple was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce and engaged in a custody battle over Worden’s then-6-year-old son, CNBC reports.

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In July 2019, Worden “alleged her estranged spouse had guessed the password and illegally accessed her bank account while the spouse was deployed to the International Space Station,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas said on Friday, in a statement they headlined “Far Out”.

In fact, “Worden had actually opened the account in April 2018,” and both parties “had accessed it until January 2019 when Worden changed the credentials,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.

“The investigation revealed Worden had granted her spouse access to her bank records from at least 2015, including her login credentials,” the statement said. 

Worden pleaded guilty of making false statements to NASA’s Office of Inspector General about McClain committing identity theft. U.S. District Judge Alfred Bennett accepted Worden’s guilty plea on November 13. Her plea came ahead of a jury trial scheduled to begin next Monday in Houston federal court.

The Kansas resident is scheduled for sentencing in February and faces up to five years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 fine. 

The lesbian space drama first made headlines in 2019, ahead of Worden’s 2020 indictment in the Southern District of Texas.

McClain’s attorney told The New York Times then that his client had checked the account only to monitor family finances, and that she’d never been warned by Worden she didn’t have access.

The attention even prompted a social media post by the astronaut, rare among the publicity-shy, space-faring fraternity.

“There’s unequivocally no truth to these claims,” McClain posted to Twitter, now X. “We’ve been going through a painful, personal separation that’s now unfortunately in the media. I appreciate the outpouring of support.”

That intended all-female spacewalk in 2019 was scrubbed last minute due to ill-fitting spacesuits, but Commander McClain made history in March as one half of the first-ever all-female commander and pilot duo on the SpaceX Crew-10 mission to the ISS.

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