Facing extreme political pressure to regain dominance in the Space Race, the Soviet Union launched the Soyuz-1 spacecraft in April of 1967 as the initial phase of an elaborate spacewalk demonstration. Tragically, rather than bringing prominence to the Soviet space regime, the mission became a sequence of failure. Manufacturing flaws doomed the vehicle from the outset, and Soyuz-1 became the first in-flight fatality of space exploration. The circumstances from which this mission originated — where schedule pressures loomed so large that mission success superseded crew safety — provide many lessons applicable years after the Space Race. Although times and environments have changed since the Soyuz-1 incident, the constants of external pressure, uncertainty and risk live on. A historical perspective of Soyuz-1 shows that our assumptions when managing risk can mean the difference between mission success and failure.