Well as I said the Moon will be much more economically significant than the Antarctic. I say, let the socialist have Antarctic- it can be a monument to them. But there of course would huge amounts of oil and other minerals on Antarctic which could be economically mined, but I like parks and wilderness, so I would favor keeping it as a park.

But as the link I provide said "No-one had ever even seen Antarctica before 1820."
And that is probably mostly right.

So your "We've had thousands of years to colonize antarctica"
doesn't make much sense. I mean with the Moon we have at least seen the Moon for thousands of years.

And because we haven't done something yet doesn't mean much. Another aspect is that for private sector, they have only *begun* to be legally *allowed* to launch rockets into space.
Now, it's true that we have only had the vague capability to get anything into space starting around 1945 with the German V-2. And even getting the Moon was thought by a number of scientists, to be impossible because of the vacuum of space.

I think the only thing that moves slower than a bureaucracy is humankind. And I think it's questionable whether the addition of bureaucracies increase or decrease humankind's speed.