Gerhard Thiele inside the Columbus Control Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, near Munich, Germany. Thiele, who flew on board Space Shuttle mission STS-99 in 2000, participated in the ESA-DLR EVA Blog during Thomas Reiter's spacewalk on 3 August 2006. ESA astronaut Thomas Reiter and NASA colleague Jeff Williams spent nearly six hours outside the International Space Station installing items of hardware and deploying instruments and experiments.