Anne McClain

Anne McClain (born June 7, 1979, Spokane, Washington, U.S.) is an American astronaut who spent 204 days in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) from December 2018 to June 2019.

McClain graduated in 2002 from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, with a bachelor’s in mechanical and aeronautical engineering. She received a Marshall scholarship to study in the United Kingdom and earned a master’s in aerospace engineering from the University of Bath in 2004 and a master’s in international relations from the University of Bristol in 2005.

After McClain’s return to the United States, she became a pilot of the OH-58D Kiowa Warrior attack helicopter. She flew more than 200 combat missions in the Iraq War. In 2013 she graduated from the U.S. Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River, Maryland, and became a NASA astronaut.

McClain’s first spaceflight was on Soyuz MS-11, which launched to the ISS on December 3, 2018, with Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko and Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. She performed two space walks, one with Saint-Jacques and the other with American astronaut Nick Hague. (She was to have performed the first all-woman space walk with American astronaut Christina Koch, but McClain decided against it for safety reasons because only one medium-sized space suit was ready.) McClain returned to Earth on June 25, 2019.

Prior to McClain’s launch to the ISS, she and her wife, former air force intelligence officer Summer Worden, were in the midst of divorce proceedings. In March 2019 Worden complained to the Federal Trade Commission that McClain had improperly accessed her bank account from the ISS. NASA’s inspector general investigated the complaint, and after McClain’s return to Earth, the case attracted media attention, because McClain was the first person accused of committing a crime in space. However, McClain was cleared, and Worden was indicted in April 2020 on two counts of making false statements to federal authorities.

McClain was chosen in 2020 for the team of 18 astronauts who will be eligible to fly on the first missions of the Artemis program, which would return American astronauts to the Moon for the first time since 1972. On the Artemis III mission, scheduled for 2026, two astronauts would land on the lunar surface. Those astronauts, whom NASA has said would be the first woman and the first person of color on the Moon, would spend almost a week in the Moon’s south polar region.

Among McClain’s honors are the Distinguished Service Medal and the Bronze Star. She is an avid rugby player and was on the United States national team from 2004 to 2006 and in 2010.