He spent six years working alongside other NASA scientists to develop the helicopter’s propulsion system, its controller and other key components. Two years later, the company joined with NASA on the Mars helicopter project, and Elbasyouni was promoted to lead electronics engineer.

In 2012, he was hired by a technology company that was developing electric aircraft. He eventually transferred to the University of Pennsylvania, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering. At one point he said he worked more than 90 hours a week at a Subway sandwich shop to make ends meet. He struggled to afford tuition at the University of Kentucky, especially after the family farm was bulldozed. Loay Elbasyouni’s uncle, Abdelwahab Elbasyouni, at the house where Loay’s family used to live in Beit Hanoun ‘Indescribable feeling’Īs Gaza weathered one crisis after another, Elbasyouni pursued his studies in the US. Since then, Israel 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. Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005, but two years later Hamas took control of the strip from rival Fatah forces. Elbasyouni said Israeli military tanks bulldozed his father’s fruit orchards on four occasions. The fighting was especially intense in and around frontier towns like Beit Hanoun. Some 6,000 Palestinians and 1,000 Israelis were killed in fighting, attacks and Israeli military operations before the violence ebbed in 2005. 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.

The 42-year-old has himself made an astonishing journey from the northern town of Beit Hanoun near the heavily guarded Israeli frontier to the US space agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he helped design the Ingenuity helicopter. “When you deal with people and politics, you don’t know where things can go.” “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. 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.īut he said an expedition to his hometown in the Gaza Strip, where posters celebrate his achievement, feels even farther away because of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions.

Mars drone