You mean Antarctica, not the Artic. The Arctic refers to regions/countries along the Artic Ocean which includes Canada, USA, and Scandinavia. The reason Antarctica is not developed is because of an series of treaties known as the Antarctic Treaty System [1]. It's an agreed upon 'pristine environment' for research. Development is prohibited and there are extreme measures to maintain its relatively pureness. For one fun example - poop cannot be disposed of on premises. It needs to be bagged up and shipped back home to be disposed of.

Rocketry is a similar story. Rockets, since the 60s, have gradually become less capable and more expensive. For instance Boeing/Lockheed have been granted defacto unlimited taxpayer money to develop a basic functional 'homegrown' rocket system - the SLS. The goal was achieve little more than we did in the 60s. They started work 11 years ago, have received more than $30 billion, and and have yet to manage to get off the ground. Stay tuned for their latest failure - they will [fail to] launch on November 14th! For reference, we went from nothing to putting a man on the moon in 9 years in the 60s.

If it ever manages to be fit for duty, the SLS is estimated to cost an average of $2 billion per flight, and is completely incapable of landing massive-load cargo on Mars, let alone transiting things back. It's completely and absolutely unfit for duty. Most of everything Musk has done with SpaceX was being mocked as literally impossible by Boeing et al (by Tory Bruno) while he was struggling to achieve rapid reuse among various other technologies which have completely revolutionized the industry.

We would not be getting to Mars had SpaceX (or a similar company) not emerged.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org//wiki/Antarctic_Treaty_System