Due to the non-cooperative character of space target and the overfitting of adaboost algorithm under high noises, an space target recognition method based on combined features and improved adaboost is proposed. The combined features which consist of the geometric features and transform features are extracted to describe target information precisely from different aspects. Furthermore, an improved adaboost algorithm is presented, which adopts a new weights updating method piecewisely in the light of the weights distribution of samples. Thus the proposed method can avoid the overfitting problem and improve the robustness of classification. Experiments on space target images showed that the proposed method has better classification capability and obtains higher classification accuracy.