Ready-Date-8615

It depends on your definition of winter. The last "summer" flight leaves when there's still 24hr of light. Sunset happens about a month later, and then it's 24hr darkness. The technical season extends from the winter solstice to sunrise.

Several former USAP employees have worked aboard the space station. A few years ago (maybe 2018?), they arranged a video call between the pole and two former polies who were currently aboard the ISS.

Human civilization hates this one weird trick!

SP is in fact the best place for IceCube because it allows consistent coverage of the northern sky. You're right that most of the radio astronomy (and potential future optical astronomy) would work better at Dome C, and the main reason they're at the pole is because we have a station at the pole.

There is also a smaller pole which is moved every year to account for the shifting ice sheet, known as the geographic pole (again, see his TikTok/YouTube/Instagram ^ ).

If one were to perform such an irresponsible ritual, one might hypothetically prefer to use this geographic pole rather than the ceremonial barber-striped pole, which would be unfortunate, because it is rapidly receding from the station entrance.

Also, if you were irresponsible enough to do this at -100F in the dead of winter, you would also probably be irresponsible enough not to wear any clothes while doing so.

But this is all hypothetical.