International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 25-28, 1999 / Riviera Hotel and Convention Center, Las Vegas, Nevada / The turbo code is a block code even though a convolutional encoder is used to construct codewords. Its performance depends on the code word length. Since the invention of the turbo code in 1993, most of the bit error rate (BER) evaluations have been performed using large block sizes, i.e., sizes greater than 1000, or even 10,000. However, for telemetry and command, a relatively short message (<500 bits) may be used. This paper investigates the turbo-coded BER performance for short packets. Fading channel is also considered. In addition, biased channel side information is adopted to improve the performance.