You start with a finite supply of explosives in your crash site. Use them carefully for emergency situations such as a cliff in your bus.
You get the first explosive recipe in purple science, which is not considered particularly far into the tech tree. It's the same tech tier that you get train stations/signals, red belts, filter inserters, or the ability to build research labs beyond the 1 you start with. You shouldn't need to scale up too much before this, because you don't have all the tools that you need to do so without some of the other things you'll find in purple science. In red science you can make due with a small bootstrap spaghetti base, because all the research costs are still so low.
The real recipe for explosives that you can produce on a larger scale is in green science, which is mid game, about half a tier later. But this earlier recipe in purple is useful for emergency situations like you describe.