>EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted.. Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of t

>EDIT: not sure why this is downvoted.. Antarctica is basically inaccessible for the winter half of the year - sending a plane is possible (for some parts of the winter), but it's so fantastically dangerous that you risk losing the plane and killing an entire flight crew, so you only do it if there's absolutely no other choice. Saying "under allow no conditions where a person cannot choose to leave" is rather naive. If someone is disturbed to the point they pose a threat to life safety (including damage to the station that might affect habitability) then you're better off locking them up until the summer when they can be collected safely - it's inhumane, but at least you won't risk getting other people killed trying to accommodate them. Similarly, you can't just say they should build bigger stations - crew morale and comfort are important factors, but at the end of the day practicality and survivability is king. You can't just order some building supplies and throw a house up in a couple of months - building supplies and tools have to be offloaded at the coast by ship and carried overland to the building site, buildings have to have appropriate HVAC for heating and conditioning the large spaces that require more power and thus more generation capacity, which means having to store more supplies, so you need to build more storage structures... saying "just build bigger" shows a profound lack of respect for the realities of working in one of the harshest and most unforgiving environments on the planet.