In this paper, an adaptive fault‐tolerant attitude coordinated tracking problem for spacecraft formation is investigated under a directed communication topology containing a spanning tree with the leader as the root, where inertia matrices and external disturbances are unknown time‐varying. With no prior knowledge of faults and inertia, an adaptive approach is proposed to reject the influence of disturbances and uncertainties. Meanwhile, combining with a consensus algorithm and graph theory, an adaptive fault‐tolerant attitude synchronization tracking control law is presented to regulate the attitude to a common time‐varying reference state. Aiming at optimizing the control law, a dynamic adjustment function is introduced to adjust the control gain according to the attitude tracking error. The effectiveness of the proposed control approach is demonstrated through simulation results.