Anne McClain

Anne McClain (born June 7, 1979, Spokane, Washington, U.S.) is an American astronaut who made two flights to the International Space Station (ISS), the first in December 2019 and the second in March 2025.

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-size space suit was ready.) McClain returned to Earth on June 25, 2019. She spend 204 days in space.

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. McClain was cleared, and Worden was indicted in April 2020 on two counts of making false statements to federal authorities. (Worden pleaded guilty in 2025, and was sentenced to three months in prison in 2026.)

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 IV mission, scheduled for 2028, 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.

McClain returned to the ISS as commander of the SpaceX Crew-10 mission, which carried three other astronauts: Nicole Ayers of the U.S., Onishi Takuya of Japan, and Kirill Peskov of Russia. Crew-10 launched on March 14, 2025, and returned to Earth on August 9 after 147 days in space. Between her two spaceflights, McClain has spent 351 days in orbit..

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.