That is entirely possible. It may well be that the sprite coordinates are not placed exactly where they should be. Early hardware had known nuances with some (eg. 1 or 2) sprites being offset a few pixels with respect to the other sprites. In fact, I'm currently working on Frogger (same hardware) and did have to tweak the sprite routines that I lifted from Galaxian; Frogger has the advantage in that the background can be used as a reference, though of course the background is also subject to its own nuances. I'll finish up on Frogger and revisit Galaxian to see if there are any changes I should back-port.
I'm also thinking it may be possible to implement a non-tate mode for Galaxian as well!