Before the submissions started flooding in, governments around the world first went to Nova Technologies' website to read the criteria in full.
What they saw made them pause, because Nova was asking for something even sharper than they had braced for, and the very first line told them so.
The minimum land requirement: 120 square kilometers. A single parcel, and a massive one — bigger than the city of Paris, twice the size of Manhattan, almost exactly the footprint of San Francisco. Nova was not asking for a site. It was asking for a small city's worth of ground.
And the strange thing, the thing that made the number land even harder once it settled, was that by Nova's own measure this was small. The space station was 55 kilometers by 27.5 — 1,512.5 square kilometers, larger than Hong Kong, twice the size of Singapore, near enough the whole of London. Against that, a Medical Center was a fraction, a rounding error, a single borough beside a floating nation.
