outposts and supplies

Wow. When it gets this cold, one really has to bundle up just to go outside for a few minutes. A climate this inhospitable allows me to day-dream that I am on a distant planet during the winter months, trapped, awaiting the saucer that brings the tea and other little luxuries. There are indigenous populations farther north that rely on supplies flown in to their communities, though during the winter there are "ice-roads" that allow transport over land, lake and river. Their ancestors lived on a "different" planet, so to speak. And they looked up into space at a different angle from other peoples, and they saw the movement of the northern lights in the sky. What did think, and what stories did they tell?

Is it easier, I wonder, for a spacecraft to enter a planet's orbit at the poles? I remember reading about Asimov's gravitational-powered vessels and thoughts of the Inuit living so high up North on our planet lead to the question. Things are different up there, and not just because of the ice and snow. Earthmen are frequently pulling meteorites out of the polar ice-caps and studying them. But maybe gravitational pull is greater at the equator. It certainly rhymes. Pull at the pole suggests something entirely different.