[en] The solution to the exterior three dimensional Stokes problem is sought in the form of a single layer potential of unknown density. This reduces the problem to a boundary integral equation of the first kind whose operator is the velocity component of the single layer potential. It is shown that this component is an isomorphism between two appropriate Sobolev spaces containing the unknown densities and the data respectively. The isomorphism corresponds to a variational problem with coercive bilinear form. The latter property allows us to consider various fixed point iterative schemes that converge to the unique solution of the integral equation. Explicit error estimates are also obtained. The successive approximations are also considered in a more computable form by using the product integration method of Atkinson. (author). 47 refs