Gazan Behind NASA Mars Mission: Visiting Home Harder Than Mars

LOS ANGELES (KI) – Space engineer Loay Elbasyouni was part of the NASA team that made history this month by launching an experimental helicopter from the surface of Mars.
But he said an expedition to his hometown in the Gaza Strip, where posters celebrate his achievement, feels even farther away because of Zionist and Egyptian restrictions.
"When you deal with electrons and technology, you can calculate things and know their path,” he told The Associated Press news agency in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. "When you deal with people and politics, you don’t know where things can go.”
The 42-year-old has himself made an astonishing journey from the northern town of Beit Hanoun to the U.S. space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he helped design the Ingenuity helicopter.
He left Gaza in 1998 to study in the United States and has only returned once, for a brief visit in 2000 prior to the second Palestinian Intifada. Some 6,000 Palestinians were killed in fighting, attacks and the occupying regime’s military operations before the violence ebbed in 2005.
The fighting was especially intense in and around towns like Beit Hanoun. Elbasyouni said the Zionist regime’s military tanks bulldozed his father’s fruit orchards on four occasions.
The regime withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but two years it imposed a crippling siege on the territory after Hamas resistance movement won in the elections. Since then, the occupying regime and Egypt have maintained a blockade that strictly limits the movement of people and goods in and out of the narrow coastal strip, which is home to more than two million Palestinians.
As Gaza weathered one crisis after another, Elbasyouni pursued his studies in the U.S.
He struggled to afford tuition at the University of Kentucky, especially after the family farm was bulldozed. At one point he said he worked more than 90 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop to make ends meet. He eventually transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering.
In 2012, he was hired by a technology company that was developing electric aircraft. Two years later, the company joined with NASA on the Mars helicopter project, and Elbasyouni was promoted to lead electronics engineer.