Booster and satellite debris were dredged from the sea bottom and it was ultimately discovered that a hairline crack in one SRB motor caused exhaust gas to escape and burn through the Delta's RP-1 tank, igniting the propellant.

There had been an upper stage failure of a Delta 2000 series in April and three weeks later, an Atlas-Centaur exploded 55 seconds after liftoff.

While this record (three failures out of 16 NASA launches during 1977) would have been acceptable in the 1960s, it was not welcomed at all in the late 1970s after the early "Wild West" days of the space program had passed and the hardware was supposed to be mature.

The second Delta 3000 failure, Vehicle 150, was launched on 7 December 1979, but its Satcom communications satellite remained trapped in low Earth orbit when the third stage failed to ignite.

This was televised on CNN to mark NASA's first launch since the Challenger disaster four months earlier, but proved to be a serious embarrassment to the program.

Two voltage spikes in the power system caused a sudden major load on the first stage battery, which ordinarily supplied 9 amperes of power, but momentary shot up to 188 amperes, a more than 2000% increase that quickly drained it and resulted in loss of the electrical current used to keep the engine valves open.

Because engineers had not taken into account the shape of the wiring harness when this modification was made, it banged against other components inside the first stage due to vibration during launch.

During the first half of the 1980s, the rate of Delta launches drastically declined due to the Space Shuttle taking a large part of its missions.

Delta 178 was largely the result of poor quality control due to plans for eventually phasing out ELVs in favor of the space shuttle - most of the engineers who worked on the program had left and one senior McDonnell-Douglass engineer remarked that 178 had "the worst quality control I ever saw on a Delta vehicle".