One designs tests in order to guarantee certain levels of quality for their products and I can see how important a high level of quality must be implemented on projects building satellites. Should anything go wrong and the product is lost, or the ratio of the cost of making repairs compared to the cost of preventing points of failure being to high.

Given the amount of processes you said to have, there will be a risk management office and a quality management office. I'm guessing the risk management office, among other things, will do some calculations on the Earned Monetary Value for situations where strategies of avoiding or mitigating risks are compared to doing nothing. Based on that, doing a lot of tests may be seen as being really cheap compared to failure events.

Documenting situations for what went wrong is of extreme importance for making sure it won't happen again. When doing a new project one will not forget to take some measures on matters that may be similar to previous ones. So 'lessons learned' from previous projects helps in improving quality and reducing risks for new projects. Also in preventing occurrences where money would have to be spent to implement contingency plans or workarounds on problems.

The objective of having all those processes is to lower the cost of projects. Strategies for quality have, of course, associated costs. Is it worth to incur in such costs? Well, it depends when compared to the costs incurred when having your products fail.

One necessary process for the project is to revise the documentation and identifying what is applicable to the current project, as there may be cost and time consuming activities that bring no value.

All those processes are invaluable as they help on identifying total project cost to present to your clients. Either they accept them or they don't. But you know what it will cost to the company to do something for the client. And you can decide whether the project is an opportunity or a financial disaster for the company.