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The paper presents an attitude control problem of reusable launch vehicles in reentry phase. The controller is designed based on synthesizing robust adaptive control into backstepping control procedure in the presence of input constraint, model uncertainty, and external disturbance. In view of the coupling between the states of translational motion and the states of attitude motion, the control-oriented model is developed, where the uncertainties do not satisfy linear parameterization assumption. The time derivative of the virtual control input is viewed as a part of uncertain term to facilitate the analytic computations and avoid the 'explosion of terms' problem. The robust adaptive backstepping control scheme is first proposed to overcome the uncertainty and external disturbance. The robust adaptive law is employed to estimate the unknown bound of the uncertain term. Furthermore, the attitude control problem subjects to input constraint is studied, and the constrained robust adaptive backstepping control strategy is proposed. Within the Lyapunov theory framework, the stability analysis of the closed-loop system is carried out, and the tracking error converges to a random neighborhood around origin. Six-degree-of-freedom reusable launch vehicle simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]