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Underactuated attitude control is supposed to be used on spacecraft when failure happens with onboard actuators. One main problem with existing underactuated attitude control designs is their limited capabilities against disturbances. In order to solve this problem, an approach based on the theory of H ∞ is proposed in this paper. Two propositions are derived from the H ∞ theory to improve the robustness of one popular underactuated attitude control design, which was presented by Tsiotras et al. It is proved mathematically that the controller satisfying these two propositions respectively can stabilize the underactuated attitude system locally or globally. The numerical simulations show that the improved controllers based on the H ∞ theory could provide higher pointing accuracy for small satellites against disturbances. This validates the effectiveness of the proposed H ∞ based approach to improve existing underactuated attitude control designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]