People can be highly irrational, but also very rational within different worldviews which can lead to completely different conclusions being drawn. For example, when the Space Shuttle was first proposed and its supposed high launch cadence was announced, many in the U.S. recognized this was likely nonsense, as due to various technical reasons, such a high launch cadence would likely not be possible. So NASA was clearly stretching the truth, mostly for funding to get the project developed. On the other side of the world, the Soviets also recognized that NASA was stretching things. And the "rational" reason was obvious: this craft wasn't really for space research at all, but was rather a military spacecraft intended to do things like snatch Soviet satellites out of orbit.