The parafoil-payload system, which plays an important role in such fields as aerospace and military affairs, can be applied for precision airdrop, nondestructive landing and large spacecraft recovery. Therefore, based on 8-DoF dynamic model of the parafoil-payload system, the lateral nonlinear control method has been adopted to analyze and simulate the tracking of the parafoil-payload system. The simulation results show that 100 m will be the optimum distance L1 between the vehicle and the reference point, under which condition, the proposed parafoil-payload system can efficiently achieve trajectory tracking under different turning angles of 90°, 180°, 270° and 360° without wind or with a constant wind of 5 m/s. It illustrates that the lateral non-linear control method exhibits a better control performance as well as certain control ability to withstand wind, which can be applied to the trajectory tracking of the parafoil-payload system, thus providing a good reference to the optimization design of the parafoil-payload system and precision control of large spacecraft recovery.