Link adaptation in mobile satellite channels is difficult because of the large propagation delay, the frequent signal blockage and the variation of the channel statistics. In this paper, we propose a cross-layer link adaptation strategy that exploits statistical, long-term CSI to increase the throughput when some retransmissions are available; this increase is obtained while meeting a target outage probability constraint. Our strategy takes as inputs the estimated packet error rates of the available modulation and coding schemes (MCS) and their rates; as an output, it returns the optimum sequence of MCS to be used. Results will also show that simple information acquisition strategies can still provide very good results.