Originally Posted by
TURIN
From what I can gather one of the biggest problems in the polar areas is that it's very rocky and uneven. The earlier missions had the luxury of choosing flat open areas, but even then Neil Armstrong had to take manual control to avoid a rocky area.
Once Apollo 12 demonstrated spot landings were possible later Apollos went into some uneven sites (Apollo14 and 15) and also some very terrain constrained and mountainous sites…(Apollos 16 and 17 in particular).
There were a whole raft of reasons unrelated to terrain as to why high latitude sites can be tricky to access, especially if the arrival will be preceded by a period in lunar orbit, some of it tied in with facets of orbital mechanics, some of it down to requirements for tracking of a lander either pre-landing or in the event of a return, on the climb-out..it’s also fair to say until the last couple of decades the very high latitude areas weren’t well mapped in 3D.
What has changed matters in the recent years is the suspicion there may be easily available water at high latitudes, so the potential rewards of going to the poles outweigh the increased difficulty of landing there verses landing at equatorial sites.