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From Staff Reporter Mary Jean Spadafora:

At the Space Needle this morning, former astronaut Buzz Aldrin announced that Gregory Schneider, 27, of Tucson, Ariz., won the Space Race 2012 competition.

Schneider, a recent law-school graduate now doing a clerkship with an appeals-court judge, will take a 20-minute ride into suborbital space — once the spacecraft is built.

Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon in 1969, said, “There is a mystique about space, and we are trying to renew that spirit.”

Aldrin is on the board of the Virginia company that is organizing the flight, which could be a few years off.

Schneider was among some 50,000 people who had entered the contest. Second place went to Sara Cook, who works as a diplomatic assistant at the Japanese Embassy in Washington, D.C.