Reality mingles with adaption as Hollywood star George Clooney joins space veterans Gene Cernan, Tom Stafford and Jim Lovell at a gala dinner at the Western Airways Airport Hangar in Sugar Land in Texas to celebrate the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 13 mission.

At Tuesday night's gala dinner, the guests dined in a special room which was designed to mimic the surface of the moon.

The Apollo 13 mission was the seventh of America's Apollo Space Program. It was commanded by Lovell and was the third intended to land on the moon, but after it launched on April 11, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded, crippling the spacecraft. The crew fought against all odds like loss of cabin heat, shortage of water, management of the carbon dioxide removal system, and safely returned to Earth, landing in the South Pacific Ocean on April 17, 1970.

The Hollywood star, George Clooney is a brand ambassador for Omega, which sponsored this event and had also funded the Apollo mission 45 years ago. Omega had outfitted the astronauts on the mission with their watches.

George who adorned the red carpet last month with wife, Amal for the premiere of Tomorrowland, has himself played a cowboy astronaut in Gravity.

Other invitees included many from the cast of the upcoming drama series, Astronaut Wives Club, such as Yvonne Strahovski and Joanna Garcia Swisher and also the show's executive producer Stephanie Savage. According to IMDb, the show 'tells the real story of the women who stood beside some of the biggest heroes in American history during the height of the space race'.

The mission has been remarkably adapted in Ron Howard's 1995 Oscar nominated film. The film starred Tom Hanks, Kevin Bacon, Bill Paxton, Gary Sinise, and Ed Harris and was nominated for nine Oscars. The phrase 'Houston, we have a problem' was coined here.