Saw this comment over at Naked Capitalism today and just had to share it here:

Had a bad thought. Suppose that the engineers say that it is far too risky for those astronauts to go back to Earth using the Starliner so they will have to wait to get a lift with SpaceX’s Dragon capsule or maybe a Russian Soyuz after several months. But then the Boeing board meets and decides that if that happened, that it would make their program look bad and endanger future contracts. So then they order those two astronauts to fly Starliner back to Earth right away. It could happen that way.