Satellite attitude control of a microsatellite of the CNES Myriade series is considered. Reduction of saturations on the angular rate of reaction wheel actua-tors is addressed by means of control gain adaptation. The proposed adaptive control design has the following features: performances of the adaptive law are the same as those of a predefined linear time-invariant control when the state is close to the equilibrium; adaptation is structured allowing to include engineering considerations in the design; asymptotic stability is guaranteed based on Lyapunov arguments; fine tuning of adaptive gains is made by linear matrix inequality based convex optimization. The novelties compared to previous results are: to include mag-netotorquer information in the adaptive scheme; to provide a simplified design procedure.