Aimed at the difficulty, in the micro-Doppler characteristic extraction, caused by the Doppler frequency produced by high-speed trajectory movement of space target to which the micro-Doppler frequency is added, a method is proposed in this paper based on EMD algorithm to achieve translational motion compensation accurately and extract micro-Doppler characteristics. Firstly, the micro-Doppler effect of space spinning target in narrowband radar is deduced and the influence of translational motion on micro-Doppler is analyzed. Secondly, the radar echoes are decomposed into a series of intrinsic-mode functions (IMFs), and the EMD algorithm is used to decompose the instantaneous frequency of the IMFs. The translational motion compensation can be achieved by judging the translational frequency shift component and analyzing the power of IMFs. Finally, the micro-Doppler curves are separated and the micro-motion features of space target such as spinning frequency are also obtained based on the EMD algorithm. Simulations show that the proposed algorithm is feasible and effective.