In this paper, the authors focus their attention in the main two methods of cooperative communications: decode and forward, and amplify and forward and how they can be used in a new concept of cooperative satellite communications. They present an analysis of both in terms of symbol error rate and power allocation and analyze which would be more efficient when relaying information from the satellite to a mobile node in the terrestrial network. They propose a protocol that combines selective and incremental relaying to optimize the cooperative scheme.