I think you misunderstood that section. I read it as an opinion of what he should do, not as a statement of fact. Every US Government contractor should always try to be/look as patriotic as possible. My mom did a ton of print work for McDonnald Douglas in the 90s to help look good during the DC -X/Venturestar cook off.
That is an excerpt from the article, the flavor of the article is not objective. It tries on the surface to support Musk. Talk about "An overweight, spiteful, nationalist Russian politician named Dmitri Rogozin". However it also on a deeper level criticizes him (and the Russians for re-acting!).
So if you read it carefully it is written to support ULA. How so? Here are few points:
* "On its merits, the injunction should not stand." and basically talks about how most space and military related Russian enterprises are state controlled so this injunction should be lifted as unrealistic.
* It is criticizing the Russians, saying they just angrily react to Musk's provocation. So it tries to shame them based on their rash decisions.
* It talks about how Musk's rockets had one failure. And they did, but how ULA has many many more successful flights.
Now some those things are not lies or fabrications. One of Musk's rockets did blow up. And Lockheed and friends did have many more successful launches. It is just the style it was written and ideas it presents seem biased to me. And on this topic, we probably won't be seeing any objective or unbiased articles. On a higher level, this makes for an interesting study in PR relations.
