It would still be snow, though, which would have let them discover the issue of the bald tires, and I'd guess the issues that required them to drive the thing b

It would still be snow, though, which would have let them discover the issue of the bald tires, and I'd guess the issues that required them to drive the thing backwards. If there weren't enough of it in a convenient spot, people were already making artificial snow by then. Or they could have just bulldozed a lot of it into a test course. So they could at least have learned something. But if you're right and Antarctica was the closest place to test it, then they should have planned for that. Expecting something novel to work the first time it's tried isn't a plan. It isn't a strategy. It's just a fantasy.