Mattel Skip-Bo. Mattel purchased Fisher-Price, Inc. in 1993, Tyco Toys, Inc. (owners of the Matchbox and Dinky Toys brands) in 1997, and Pleasant Company (maker of the American Girl brand) in 1998. Mattel purchased The Learning Company in 1999 for $3.5 billion, but sold it in 2000 at a loss. The company had a $430.9 million net loss that year. Mattel earned the first grant for Disney Princess doll licenses in 2000. In December 2000, Mattel sued the band Aqua, saying their song "Barbie Girl" violated the Barbie trademark and turned Barbie into a sex object, referring to her as a
ITS launch vehicle was expected to follow a year or more later. Early Mars flights—in the mid-2020s or later—were expected to carry mostly equipment and few people. The ITS tanker is a propellant tanker variant of the ITS second stage spacecraft. This spacecraft design was to be used exclusively for launch and short-term holding of propellants to be transported to low-Earth orbit. Once on orbit, a rendezvous operation was to have been effected with one of the "interplanetary spaceships", plumbing connections made, while a maximum of of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants would be transferred in one load to the spaceship. To