International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 18-21, 2004 / Town & Country Resort, San Diego, California / The design of a protocol for a satellite cluster link establishment and management that accounts for link corruption, node failures, and node re-establishment is presented in this paper. This protocol will need to manage the traffic flow between nodes in the satellite cluster, adjust routing tables due to node motion, allow for sub-networks in the cluster, and similar activities. This protocol development is in its initial stages and we will describe how we use the LabVIEW Sate Diagram tool kit to generate the code to design a state machine representing the protocol for the establishment of inter-satellite communications links.