A robust adaptive back-stepping control strategy is proposed for attitude control design for reusable launch vehicles(RLV) in reentry phase in the presence of inertia matrix uncertainty and moment disturbances. Firstly, during the virtual control input design procedure, the adaptive law is used to estimate the unknown bound of the uncertainty. Secondly, during the actual control input design procedure, time derivative of the virtual control input is considered as the uncertain term to eliminate the “explosion of complexity” inherent in traditional back-stepping control. A robust term is applied to compensate the influence of uncertain term and moment disturbances. Then based on the Lyapunov analysis, tracking error converges to random neighborhood around zero. Finally, simulations on X-33 6-DOF show the effectiveness of the proposed controller.