"No! The situation isn't "isn't good". We are spiralling out of control towards an immense, immense planet whose gravitational pull will compact this entire vessel to the size of a single constipated mouse dropping long before we even enter its atmosphere in five days' time. And that's a best-case scenario which rests upon the massively implausible assumption that the ship hasn't shredded itself to tiny fragments long before then. We have one engine: a single, solitary, solo engine, pointed in one direction, which is absolutely the couldn't-be-worse wrong direction, and the manouvering capability of a quadriplegic elephant falling from the highest parapet of the Chicago TwinTowers, tied to a grand piano with no castors."

From the recent novel "Colony" by Rob Grant.