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STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS & USED WITH PERMISSION
(Left to right) Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and Soichi Noguchi, prior to disembarking the SpaceX Crew Dragon Resilience capsule after splashdown. Photo: NASA/Bill Ingalls.
Four astronauts strapped into their SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, undocked from the International Space Station and plunged to a fiery pre-dawn splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico Sunday, closing out the first operational flight of SpaceX’s futuristic touch-screen ferry ship.
SpaceX Crew Dragon astronauts heading home to rare pre-dawn splashdown cbsnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from cbsnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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On February 23, the Russian Ministry of Energy officially stated that it had shut off a portion of a pipeline due to an accident, an emergency measure that stopped gas flows to neighboring Kazakhstan, just as temperatures dropped again below freezing in the Central Asian country.
The explosion at the Orenburg-Novopskov pipeline section – which runs along the Soviet-era Soyuz pipeline – led to a drastic reduction of gas supplies from Russia to the West Kazakhstan region. While gas-rich, the West Kazakhstan region’s pipeline system is structured in a way that renders it dependent on Russian gas supplies.
Russia and Kazakhstan share the longest continuous border in the world, spanning 7,600 kilometers. Electricity and pipeline networks, as well as railroads and highways, intersect the border several times, because this infrastructure was mostly built during Soviet times, when the border was a mere administrative demarcation.