Orthogonal time–frequency space (OTFS) modulation combined with massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) can simultaneously address the problems caused by multipath delay, the Doppler effect, and channel fading. To mitigate inter-subcarrier and inter-symbol interference in satellite–terrestrial MIMO-OTFS systems, an iterative maximum ratio combining detection algorithm based on hard-decision interference cancelation (ICH-IMRC) is proposed. The signal detection is iterated by performing MRC on the interference-canceled received symbols. To mitigate the error spread in the interference cancelation process, iterative maximum ratio combining detection based on soft symbol interference cancelation (S-IMRC) is proposed, which is improved based on ICH-IMRC. The interference cancelation is updated by the expectation of other symbols, and the expectation and variance of symbols are updated by soft judgment with the posterior probability of symbols. To improve the detection convergence speed, optimal relaxation parameters are obtained based on the Sparrow Search Algorithm (SSA). Simulation results show that the proposed S-IMRC has superior error rate performance compared to the conventional algorithms for satellite–terrestrial MIMO-OTFS systems. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm is applicable to various satellite channel models and achieves excellent BER for different orders of orthogonal amplitude-modulated signals and different antenna array sizes.