Remote sensing satellites have restrictions for data storage and transmission over band-limited channels. The advancement of sensor technologies with high resolutions, such as multispectral and hyperspectral sensors, had caused a demand of more bit rate for transmission in real-time. Therefore, the communication system for transmission must has the highest efficiency. For this purpose, in this paper was designed an UEP (Unequal Error Protection) scheme for joint source-channel coding applied to remote sensing progressive image transmission. The proposed scheme was created based in two CCSDS (The Consultative Committee for Space Data System) recommendations, taking into account the different error sensitivities of the bitstream to improve the system performance. In that sense, an optimized method to provide an effective rate allocation by choosing the appropriated channel coding rates for each bitstream part considering an acceptable distortion criteria will be shown, and a operation region formed by upper and lower bounds. Significant gains in terms of image distortion can be observed as well as an optimal operation region desirable for high data rate capabilities in near space applications.