Aspects of the disclosure provide a handoff procedure for a satellite communication system such as a broadband low-Earth orbit (LEO) satellite communication system. A gateway and a user terminal (UT) coordinate and schedule a satellite-to-satellite handoff in such a way that there are no messaging round-trip delays between the last return service link (RSL) packet transmitted from the user terminal to the source satellite and the first RSL packet transmitted from the user terminal to the target satellite. Therefore, an outage on the return link (from the user terminal to the gateway) can be limited to the actual time for moving the antenna feed from the source satellite to the target satellite. Furthermore, an outage on the forward link (from the gateway to the user terminal) can be limited to a single round-trip delay in addition to the time for moving the antenna feed.