Marscrete.
They did seem to have a whole load of kit, but couldn't be arsed to bring a few lightweight folders.
Actually, it would probably have been easier to have just not constructed the base with damn great big corridors linking the elements together for no good reason.
It may well be desirbale to isolate elements, eg put the a reactor a distance away, with ramparts of "earth" to minimise radiation exposure. Likewise a launch/landing pad would sensibly be physically isolated from the base to minimise exposure to accidents. This doesn't seem to have been the case here though, they just seem to have wanted a hub and spoke station design, with bits put stupidly large distances apart, and just vast unused sections of the station, which would increase the leak rate into the atmosphere, and create a higher risk of a rupture (aside from the already mentioned stupid distances to travel in an emergency).
(Actually, you would probably want to bury the base anyway. Mars doesn't have a magnetosphere, so exposure to the solar wind would be a problem, although there is the suggestion that localised fields (possibly frozen into rocks) could provide miniature magnetospheres for this purpose... but I'm getting a bit OT).Whilst the Dr does seem to be suffering a bit from delusions of omnipotence (presumably to give an excuse to provide some new companions in the near future), he is 900 odd years old, and quite experienced in mucking about with time. Like James T Kirk and the Prime Directive on Star Trek, he breaks the rules more often than he keeps to them. It seemed a bit rich for Adelaide, with her 60 odd years of experience, bugger all of it related to time travel, to in effect be saying, "Actually I know more about this than you".