The problem of channel estimation and detection in shad-owed Rician (SR) fading land mobile satellite (LMS) channels is studied. It is assumed that the satellite contains a single antenna and that the earth station has multiple antennas. In the proposed detector, joint channel estimation and detection of symbols is performed. It is shown by simulation and analysis that joint detection performs better than the existing decoupled detection. In this paper, we derive closed-form expressions of the moment-generating function (MGF) o f t he received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), bit error rate (BER), analytical diversity order, and capacity for the considered detector in correlated SR fading L MS links. Next, we consider independent and identically distributed SR fading LMS channels and derive approximate expressions of MGF, symbol error rate (SER), diversity order, and capacity of the satellite system with estimated channel gains for existing decoupled and proposed joint detectors. It is shown from the analysis and simulation that the channel estimation error does not affect the diversity order but reduces the capacity of the considered system.