Gemini 6 was the fifth manned flight of the United States' two-man spacecraft. On December 15, 1965, Walter Schirra and Thomas Stafford closed to within a meter of Gemini 7, performing the world's first rendezvous between two manned spacecraft.

The Gemini heatshield was a dish-shaped structure that formed the large end of the reentry module. Constructed of a load-carrying Fiberglas sandwich structure consisting of two 5-ply faceplates of resin-impregnated glass cloth separated by a 0.65inch thick Fiberglas honeycomb core, an additional Fiberglas honeycomb was bonded to the convex side of the sandwich and filled with Dow-Corning DC-325 ablative material.

The attached segment of Gemini VI heatshield was turned black from the intense frictional heat of reentry into the Earth's atmosphere.