couldn t believe what was happening. and then all of a sudden i said well, it is me, and it is now. so what s next? reporter: the command module s electricity, light and water all lost. there was no heat source. they were 200,000 miles from earth, and going in the wrong direction. did you actually ever think, i might die? reporter: well, we thought our chances were about 10%. did you really? oh yeah. when we realized after we saw the oxygen escaping, that things could be really bad. reporter: as the world watched, ground control in houston faced a formidable task. think of a way for the crew to fix their spaceship, test it then write up step-by-step procedures for the astronauts to follow just to get home. we immediately went to the simulators to try to do in the simulators what they had to do, in the damaged apollo 13
diverting the missile. the other simple design used to be called flare. and just like a road flare, it produces some heat source and you shoot that off somewhere away from the aircraft. reporter: there are also new high-tech options. this one from defense contractor called the garnim. the senses automatically direct it and the system jams the missile and drives it away from the aircraft. reporter: systems like this are already in use on planes flown by israel s airline. in israel today, one of the homegrown defense contractors outfitted their fleet with count countermeasures to deal with the shoulder-type missiles. reporter: but when it comes
area around the wing diverting the missile. the other simple design used to be called flair. and just like a road flair, it produces some heat source. and you shoot that off somewhere away from the aircraft. under are also new high-tech options, this one from defense contractor northrop grumman called the guardian. when the system fires, it is automatically sensed and tracked. sending a laysor beam in, the system jams the missile and drives it i way from the aircraft. systems like this are in use by planes flown in israel. in israel today, one of their homegrown defense contractors outfitted their fleet with counter measures to deal with the more traditional type shoulder launch missiles. but aviation experts say when it comes to the more advanced
fe ailford used rdx, a white powder. he filled three-quarters with the concoction and the rest with toothpaste. it smells and tastes like toothpaste. i have presented this in such a way that somebody giving it a casual inspection will probably pass it. reporter: the size of the container that alford used is the size you place in checked baggage, but two smaller containers this size, which traditionally you can carry onto a plain, can also be used. these tubes would have to be either attached or placed near each other to create a similar explosion as the one you just saw. they can be detonated by a heat source. erin? all right. when we talk about the heat source, this is not just some sort of a hypothetical, right, that they said they re going to do this and authorities are worried. a toothpaste bomb has been used on passenger jet before. reporter: it has. in october 1976, anti-castro cuban operatives hid explosives
some things like matches and maybe some lighters are often not detected. so you could conceivably get it through. it takes some kind of a detonation, possibly with a heat source, to get it to go off. and he was able to do that. you can do it in a tube this size or maybe several tubes this size. you can do a small one like that? possibly, yes. it is possible, not easy, but possible. you know, cnn also demonstrated two years ago, wolf, after that 2010 plot to put printer cartridge bombs on cargo planes, we demonstrated how powerful that could have been. that wasn t a whole lot bigger than one of these and that made a huge explosion. we ve got some video of that right here. explosions easily enough to bring down a plane or cause massive casualties in a crowded situation. again, this was also the type of explosive used in that and this are fairly similar. the toothpaste explosive that we used today was substance called rdx. that substance in that video was petn, same substance used