Foucault said:

Sorry to be harsh, but this is the problem with playing tournaments you aren't bankrolled for. You get overly invested in the outcome and it prevents you from taking the appropriate risks. The answer to your question is no, you should not have passed up the opportunity to put your money in as a 80:20 favorite for fear of going broke 20% of the time.

You are going to lose most tournaments you enter. Your goal is to put yourself in the best possible position to take advantage of those rare occasions when luck favors you. Playing to not-lose rather than to win is the best way to guarantee that you won't win.

Really, the best advice I can give you is to stop playing satellites into these tournaments. That money would be much better invested in a cash game or a tournament that pays out cash, rather than a tournament that pays out something worth much less than cash to you (ie a seat into another tournament that you wouldn't otherwise play).

Agree & disagree with parts of this. Agreed that if you're not going to play well in the bigger tournament because of the stakes involved then you should just stick to lower buyin (and lower prize pool) tournaments.  Agreed that OP is not writing/thinking about the hand in a way that will help to make better decisions in the future.  And agreed that playing a lot of satellites to tournaments that are too big for you to buy into directly is very poor bankroll management.

Having said all that … as I am The Poker Player Formerly Known as Satellite Larry, I feel some need to speak generally in satellites' defence (though perhaps not so much for OP's sake).

–  The level of play in satellites (especially live) is often much worse than in freezeouts.  This is especially true if you devote some time to learning the freakishly different beast that is satellite endgame strategy.  The level of horrifically bad blunders that happen in satellites is orders of magnitude worse than the worst mistake I've ever seen anyone make in a freezeout.  I've watched multiple players with big stacks on WSOP satellite bubbles (nearly literally) take $10,200 out of their own pockets and set it on fire, thereby distributing it to the short stacks at the table, often including me.

–  Playing a satellite (if you know how to play it) is not generally worse for bankroll management than playing a very large-field tournament with the same buyin.  In both cases you run the “risk” of getting so deep that the money involved could cause you to play scared, and/or being overmatched by superior and better bankrolled opponents, and in both cases you need to play a shit-ton of events (and play them well or just run super hot in one of them) to have any reasonable hope of overcoming variance.  So if you're going to avoid satellites to better manage BR, you probably should also avoid big-field tournaments in general (and I think that's a reasonable choice to make).

–  Depending on your overall poker life-goal, taking some shots at satellites (again, especially live ones) can be, I maintain, perfectly fine and viable.  I'm not really disagreeing with Andrew here – maybe I'm saying they can be ++LifeUtilityEV even if they're –PerfectBankrollMgmtEV, and the latter can be mitigated if not reversed by studying up on sat strat and finding sats that are likely to be very soft.  

And, having said ALL THAT … even though I'm being a nitpicking devil's advocate, Andrew's advice is more important than my dissenting voice and will be helpful to more people.  There are way more people who approach satellites badly, both from a poker strategy and bankroll strategy standpoint, than there are people who study them enough to find their value and milk it.

There are two classic 2+2 posts, written a year apart by Adanthar, that are still relevant for learning the ways in which satellites do not remotely resemble freezeouts, and the ways in which people suck at them.  If you play satellites without reading them or somehow otherwise getting a decent grounding from another source, you are likely pouring money down the drain, both in the satellite itself and in the target event you're not rolled for.

-TPPFKaLL