This paper focuses on the fault tolerant attitude control problem for the reusable launch vehicle (RLV) with model uncertainties, external disturbances and actuator failures/faults during the reentry phase. First, the kinematics and dynamics of the RLV are presented, and the control-oriented mode subject to actuator malfunction is established. Next, a novel fixed-time observer is designed to estimate the compound disturbances, including failure information and uncertainties. Specifically, the proposed observer can guarantee the estimation errors converging to zero within a settling time, which is independent with the system initial conditions. Based on the proposed observer, a finite-time fault tolerant attitude control scheme is developed based on the nonsingular terminal sliding mode technology, which would improve the reentry attitude tracking performance and ensure the finite-time stability of the closed-loop attitude control system even in presence of the actuator faults. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical simulations.