In Earth-to-Space communications, well-known propagation effects such as path loss and atmospheric loss can lead to fluctuations in the strength of the communications link between a satellite and its ground station. Additionally, a less-often considered effect of shadowing due to the geometry of the satellite and its solar panels can also lead to link degradation. As a result of these anticipated channel impairments, NASA communication links have been traditionally designed to handle the worst-case impact of these effects through high link margins and static, lower rate, modulation formats. This thesis first characterizes the propagation environment experienced by a software-defined radio on the NASA SCaN Testbed through a full link-budget analysis. Then, the following chapters propose, design, and model a link adaptation algorithm to provide an improved trade-off between data rate and link margin through varying the modulation format as the received signal-to-noise operate at the most robust transmitting configuration, ensuring a low error-rate. However, with this worst-case method, the trade-off manifests in the very constrained data rate-although the data is transmitted with minimal errors, the throughput also remains low. This thesis first outlines the propagation environment experienced by a communications signal originating in Cleveland, OH and traveling to a software-defined radio on the NASA SCaN Testbed. Then, a link adaptation algorithm is designed and simulated to provide an improved trade-off between data rate and bit error rate. This flexibility between transmitting configurations allows for communications to be more efficient, as the transmitter can adapt as the signal strength improves.