The simulation of contact process of flying objects in space is important for many space missions. The hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is an attractive approach because it integrates the fidelity of physical simulation and the flexibility of numerical simulation. But the HIL contact simulation is divergent due to the time delay, e.g., the dynamic response delay and the force measurement delay. In this study, a force compensation approach is proposed toward the HIL simulation divergence problem for the damped and elastic contact. The idea is to make the compensated force close to the ideal force corresponding to the numerical position computed from the dynamics model of flying objects. The approach includes the phase lead based force compensation for the force measurement delay, and the response error based force compensation for the dynamic response delay of the motion simulator. From simulations and experiments, it is shown that the proposed approach can effectively and satisfactorily compensate the simulation divergence.