Speaking to the New York Times after her return to Earth, McClain acknowledged accessing the account from the ISS but denies any wrongdoing, stating that she merely wanted to check that her family's finances were in order and there was enough money to pay bills while she was away. Her spouse, Summer Worden, has rejected that explanation, and has accused McClain of identity theft and improperly accessing her private financial records.

The ISS has made provision for a legal framework covering all of the astronauts from the five national and international space agencies that are involved in the endeavour, including the US, Canada, Japan, Russia and several European countries. The legal framework specifies that national law applies to any people and possessions in space, so McClain will then be investigated (and tried, if it comes to that), according to US law. The ISS framework also sets out provisions for extradition back on Earth, should a nation decide it wishes to prosecute a citizen of another nation for misconduct in space.

This isn’t the only “first” seen on the ISS in the past few months, nor is it the only event that has raised eyebrows about the work being done on the space station being demeaned. Real scientific experiments, like the European Space Agency’s Multiscale Boiling experiment, called Rubi, are being compared to other “experiments” like the baking of cookies in space.

Rubi will test how bubbles are affected by an electric field in space. A specialised heater, built by Airbus, will generate the bubbles and will see more than 600 test runs over the course of 5 months. Another experiment to have made the headlines is a NASA study titled “Non-Newtonian Fluids in Microgravity”, AKA “Nickelodeon Slime in Space”. This will see astronauts playing slime pong, engaging in a slime-filled balloon toss, and playing with slime bubbles, and slime spray to establish how humans and non-Newtonian fluids interact in microgravity.

In comparison, the partnership between Hilton’s Doubletree Hotels and Zero G Kitchen will establish how “cookies turn out in microgravity”. The cookies will be the first food ever freshly-baked in space, and will only be “tested” once they are back on earth. Will the cookies end up soft? Crunchy? Cakey? Chewy? Weirdly misshapen but still delicious? Nobody knows, but it seems to be enough of a burning question to launch a specially designed oven to the ISS.

NASA has avoided using an oven in space for years because of the dangers of smoke should something get burned. In addition, convection ovens rely on a fan to circulate hot air so the temperature stays constant, but this is not possible in space. The Zero G Oven that will be used on the ISS uses conduction. Powered by electricity from the internal power system on the ISS, the anti-gravity oven will use heating elements similar to a toaster oven’s, positioned so that they create a pocket of hot air around the dough samples, which will be in clear silicone packets so their progress can be monitored. The samples will be on a tray inside the oven where they will be kept from floating away.

If nothing else, all of these experiments will give us a better idea of what living in zero-gravity environments will entail, and might even provide valuable feedback for the Mars and lunar missions setting off over the next few years.