Daily Mail, Tuesday, August 27, 2019 Page 17F
loating serenely in the
weightlessness of the inter-
national Space Station,
anne McClain told a tV
interviewer back on Earth
last month that she would love to
be the first woman on the Moon.
‘i think all of us [women] would,’ the
american astronaut said smiling.
at 40, the youngest of the current naSa
astronaut corps, she was hotly-tipped
among the space agency’s 12 spacewomen
to be selected for the artemis lunar mission,
which naSa has vowed will enable a woman
to follow in neil armstrong’s footsteps.
Unfortunately for the UK-educated rugby
fanatic who wanted to be an astronaut from
the age of three, McClain has made space
history, but not in the way she expected.
lt Col McClain, a former army helicopter
pilot and iraq veteran, who uses the mili-
tary call sign ‘annimal’ — the name by which
she was known on the rugby pitch — has
become the first person to be accused of
committing a crime in outer space.
according to her estranged wife — who in
the process has outed McClain as the first
openly gay astronaut — McClain spent some
of her recent 204-day mission aboard the
space station illegally snooping on her via
the internet.
the groundbreaking case has posed a
conundrum for investigators and lawyers:
how exactly do you deal with an
extraterrestrial crime? Houston, we most
definitely have a problem.
Summer Worden, a 44-year-old former
U.S. air Force intelligence officer, has
revealed that she and lt Col McClain have
spent much of the past year embroiled in
an acrimonious dispute over their
separation, and the parenting of Ms
Worden’s six-year-old son.
She said she first became suspicious
about McClain’s activities, 254 miles up in
space, after the astronaut made clear in
emails sent from the space station that
she was remarkably well informed about
Ms Worden’s recent spending.
Ms Worden, who formerly worked for
america’s national Security agency,
asked her bank about the location of
computers used to accessed her
account recently. She discovered
that one was on a computer
network registered to naSa.
A
CCUSing her ex-lover
of identity theft and
improper access to her
private financial records,
Ms Worden has filed a complaint
with the Federal trade Commission
and her parents have complained
separately to naSa.
‘i was shocked and appalled at the
‘Space crime’: Lt Col McClain
and her estranged wife,
Ms Worden, far leftfrom Tom
Leonard
audacity by her to think that she
could get away with that, and i
was very disheartened that i
couldn’t keep anything private,’
said Ms Worden.
Back on Earth since June, lt Col
McClain insists she’s done nothing
improper. She admits she had
accessed Ms Worden’s bank
account from space, but insists she
was simply trying to sort out the
couple’s enmeshed finances.
She told naSa’s inspector gen-
eral under oath last week that she
was doing what she’d always done,
and that she had Ms Worden’s
permission to ensure the family’s
financial situation was in order.
according to her lawyer, McClain
had been attempting to make sure
there were sufficient funds in her
partner’s account to pay bills and
to pay for the child they have been
raising together.
He says she continued to use
the bank log-in password usedthroughout their relationship and
had never been told by her
estranged wife not to use it any-
more. Ms Worden saw no sign that
the astronaut moved or used the
funds in her bank account.
the bizarre case has revealed
how, behind the smiles for the
cameras as she prepared for a
historic space walk, Ms McClain
was going through emotional
turmoil back on her home planet.
their rift was focused largely
around Ms Worden’s son, born ayear before they met. the child
had been conceived through iVF
and was carried by a surrogate.
Even after they married in 2014,
Ms Worden refused to allow the
astronaut to adopt the child.
in 2018, while they were still mar-
ried, McClain asked a judge in her
home town of Houston, texas, to
grant her shared parenting rights.
She also requested the ‘exclusive
right’ to designate the child’s
primary residence if she and Ms
Worden couldn’t reach agreement.
She claimed her wife had an
explosive temper and made poor
financial decisions, asking the
court to ‘legally validate my
established and deep parental
relationship’ with the little boy.
at around the same time, claims
Ms Worden, the astronaut posted
official naSa photos on her twit-
ter account of her in a spacesuit
alongside the child. ‘the hardestpart about training for space is the
four-year-old i have to leave behind
every time i walk out the door,’ she
reportedly wrote.
the alleged tweets have now
been deleted.
Ms Worden said she was upset
that McClain was claiming to be
the boy’s mother. later in 2018, she
filed for divorce after lt Col
McClain accused her of assaulting
her. the case was dismissed, and
Ms Worden denies the accusation,
saying it was a ploy by McClain to
get control of the boy.
this bitter row continued on in
space after naSa passed on Ms
Worden’s complaints about her
bank account to her estranged
spouse on the iSS.
‘they specifically mentioned
threatening emails from orbit, and
accessing bank accounts — not
sure where that info comes from,’
McClain reportedly wrote in anemail to Ms Worden that was sent
from the space station.
the divorce is due to be settled
in court in october.
Ms Worden’s allegations are not
only deeply embarrassing for a star
astronaut on the cusp of a potential
lunar mission, but also for a space
agency that would rather not have
people think their expensively
trained crew spend their valuable
days in orbit surfing the internet
and firing off personal emails.
it costs $70.7 million to send an
astronaut to the international
Space Station, which is a collabo-
ration of space agencies from
Europe, the U.S., Russia, Japan
and Canada.
naSa said it ‘has no statement
on this [case] and does not com-
ment on personal or personnel
matters. anne McClain is an
active astronaut’.
the case also opens up for the
first time the fraught issue of deal-
ing with alleged crime in space.
Hollywood likes to portray outer
space as a lawless and unprotected
Wild West. and as the tagline for
the sci-fi horror film alien memo-
rably put it — ‘in space, no one can
hear you scream’.
However, space law experts —
yes, they exist — say that, just as
on the high seas, even if
conventional terrestrial legal juris-
dictions are no longer relevant,
laws still apply
Violations of space law are, in
theory, handled by the interna-
tional Court of Justice at the
Hague and by the home govern-
ments of the astronauts involved.
But experts warn that the expected
development of space tourism and
the establishment of extraterres-
trial colonies in the future means
the issue of intergalactic crime will
become increasingly pressing.
a complication in the McClain
case, say experts, could come at
the evidence ‘discovery’ stage as
naSa may be reluctant to give
lawyers access to the top-secret
computer networks which the
astronaut used to access the bank
account and send emails.W
HiCHEVER way the
case goes, the scan-
dal has probably put
paid to lt Col
McClain’s hopes of getting to the
Moon with naSa, an organisation
that hates controversy.
Born and raised in Spokane,
Washington state, she won a post-
graduate scholarship to study in
the UK, gaining masters’ degrees
at the universities of Bristol and
Bath. She also played top flight
English women’s rugby in the
Women’s Premiership, later
winning a place in the U.S.
women’s national team.
She flew 200 combat mis-
sions in iraq, but credits
rugby with instilling the ‘grit,
toughness and mental focus’
she needed to become an
astronaut. She was among
eight people out of 6,
applicants to earn a place in
naSa’s 2013 astronaut class.
it isn’t the first time lt Col
McClain has suffered a mishap in
space. She was scheduled to take
part in the first all-women space-
walk in March — until it was dis-
covered that naSa had packed
only one female-sized spacesuit.
a male colleague had to take her
place (although McClain later did
the spacewalk twice) and the farce
was sent up mercilessly on the U.S.
show Saturday night live. ‘the
cool thing about crying in space is
your tears keep floating around
hours after you cried them,’ said
the comedian playing McClain.
‘the most uncomfortable thing
about going to space is coming
home,’ lt Col McClain told an
interviewer. ‘it’s a little strange to
get used to gravity again.’
She may have discovered that
gravity wasn’t the worst hardship
waiting for her back on Earth.spAce
IN NEW YORKpolice!
cAll the
What do you do when your
astronaut is accused by her
estranged wife of the first
ever crime committed
254 miles above the Earth?
Picture: AP/DMITRI LOVETSKY