It didn’t. They launched, went to orbit, went to lunar transfer orbit, went to lunar orbit. The lander went down to the Lunar surface, they did some science stuff as per mission specs, then they headed back up, met with the command module, went back to Earth, braked in atmosphere, parachuted to the ocean, where they got picked up, mission accomplished.
It ALMOST went wrong very early in, when the entire Saturn V stack got hit by lightning on the way through the clouds. Their data stream was a mess, and Houston came very close to calling for an abort.
Fortunately, one of the people on the ground recognized what he was looking at from an incident in a simulation, and told them to switch SCE from Normal to Aux. They did this. It turns out the lightning strike had scrambled the normal com channel, and switching to the backup channel fixed the issue.
The rest of the flight was nominal.
Writer: Lance Berg
