A novel and efficient method to evaluate the transmission control protocol (TCP) performance over satellite links is presented. A TCP module is divided into three functional blocks, namely data processing, congestion control and error control. The re-established TCP module is easy to update TCP congestion control strategy or error control strategy. With the proposed analysis approach, the interactions between different congestion control and error control mechanisms, as well as the performance of various combination protocols in satellite environments have been investigated. Simulation results obtained through a series of experiments have shown that SNACK-based error control strategy can perform well with any other congestion control strategy. The best performance can be achieved by TCP NewReno congestion control strategy and SNACK-based error control strategy.