A new Chien search method for shortened Reed-Solomon (RS) code is proposed, based on this, a versatile RS decoder for correcting both errors and erasures is designed. Compared with the traditional RS decoder, the weighted coefficient of the Chien search method is calculated sequentially through the three pipelined stages of the decoder. And therefore, the computation of the errata locator polynomial and errata evaluator polynomial needs to be modified. The versatile RS decoder with minimum distance 21 has been synthesized in the Xilinx Virtex-Ⅱ series field programmable gate array (FPGA) xc2v1000-5 and is used by concatenated coding system for satellite communication. Results show that the maximum data processing rate can be up to 1.3Gbit/s.