The Orbital Reflector should have been a celestial triumph. Until the US president and his government shutdown became involved

Name: The Orbital Reflector.

Age: Dead on arrival.

Appearance: Beautiful, in theory.

Can you be a bit more specific? Well, it should have been a 30-metre-long balloon made of plastic sheeting coated with shimmering titanium dioxide and inflated into a giant crystal shard that would orbit 350 miles above the Earth and be visible to all humanity, like a new star in the night sky.

How lovely. What does it look like instead? All that stuff still packed into a box about the size of a brick.

Oh dear. Space things are always tricky, I hear. Yes, but as far as we know the Orbital Reflector would have worked. It was designed by the American artist Trevor Paglen and the Nevada Museum of Art, along with some hired engineers. It was part of 10-year project costing $1.3m (£1m), which would have put the first “purely artistic” object into space.

Were there problems with the launch? No. It went up successfully, along with 64 other satellites, on one of Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets on 3 December.

But if the launch went well, and the mechanism worked as planned … what happened? Who messed up? Donald Trump.

Oh, come on. Surely you can’t blame Trump for this one? Actually, it’s almost entirely his fault. You see, Paglen and the museum had to wait to deploy the reflector until the US air force had identified all the satellites it launched with, otherwise it might bump into them.

A scary thought. Unfortunately, on 22 December, much of the US government shut down, because Trump wouldn’t approve the budget unless he got money for his anti-Mexican wall.

Oh. This delayed everything for weeks, and the reflector couldn’t take it. “The satellite’s electronics and hardware were designed to function during this waiting period, but were not hardened for long-term functionality in space,” a museum spokesperson told the art market website Artnet. Now they can no longer make contact with it.

So it just floated in space, waiting for a signal, until it broke? That’s about the size of it.

Poor little lonely undeployed box of art. I know. Instead of shining brightly for a couple of months, it will now spend a few years invisibly orbiting the planet until it finally burns up in the atmosphere.

Is Trump very apologetic? I don’t know. It’s not easy to imagine that.

I just thought he might appreciate purely artistic objects, given how much he loves that wall. Touché.

Do say: “Could a broken box that you can’t see be a work of art instead?”

Don’t say: “Who wants a Mexican Deflector?”