Gazan behind Mars drone says visiting home is no small step

Residents of the Gaza Strip are celebrating one of their own, a space engineer from the territory who was part of NASA's team that made history this month by launching an experimental helicopter from the surface of Mars

BEIT HANOUN, Gaza Strip -- 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 says an expedition to his hometown in the Gaza Strip, where posters celebrate his achievement, feels even farther away because of Israeli and Egyptian restrictions. “When you deal with electrons and technology, you can calculate things and know their path," he told The Associated Press 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 hardscrabble town of Beit Hanoun near the heavily-guarded Israeli frontier to the U.S. space agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he helped design the Ingenuity helicopter.