Paul Abbate, formerly assistant director in charge of the FBI’s Washington field office, has been named executive assistant director of the bureau’s criminal, cyber, response and services branch.

Abbate will assume his new role by late January and will be succeeded by Andrew Vale at the Washington field office, the bureau said Wednesday.

He will oversee cyber and criminal investigations, incident response, victim assitace and international operations in his new post.

Abbate joined FBI in 1996 as a special agent and became part of the New York field office to serve as a SWAT team member.

He was appointed as a supervisory special agent in the Iraq unit under the FBI’s counterterrorism division in 2003 and became a senior FBI liaison officer to the Defense Department and the bureau’s personnel responsible for counterterrorism operations when he was deployed to Iraq in 2005.

His previous roles at the bureau include assistant section chief of the counterterrorism division, assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism efforts in the Los Angeles field office, FBI’s on-scene commander in Libya and special agent in charge of the Detroit division.

Col. Walt Jackim, vice commander of the U.S. Air Force‘s 45th Space Wing, has projected the Space Coast in Florida to deploy as many as 32 launches from five different rockets in 2017, Florida Today reported Tuesday.

James Dean writes the projected 32 launches will surpass 2016’s record of 23 launch operations which was the Eastern Range’s busiest year in the last two decades.

Expected launches for the year include the first of at least seven United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket launches, Orbital ATK‘s Minotaur IV rocket launch and SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 launch and Falcon Heavy rocket debut.

The report noted that the growing number of launches from Florida in the next five years resulted from an increase in companies that develop rockets including newcomers such as Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stratolaunch Systems and Virgin Galactic.

Jackim noted that resources might not be ready to support an estimated 48 annual launches from the Space Coast beginning in 2021 when the test range starts to commence weekly or bi-weekly launches.

David Shulkin, undersecretary of health at the Department of Veterans Affairs, has been chosen by President-elect Donald Trump to serve as VA secretary.

“Shulkin has the experience and the vision to ensure we will meet the healthcare needs of every veteran… an incredibly gifted doctor who is using his elite talents for medicine to care for our heroes,” Trump said in a statement released Wednesday.

Shulkin oversees VA’s healthcare system, which includes 1,700 clinics and hospitals that serve nearly nine million veterans on an annual basis.

Prior to VA, he held president and CEO roles at several healthcare institutions such as Beth Israel Medical Center, Goryeb Children’s Hospital and Morristown Medical Center.

Shulkin is an internist who previously served as chief medical officer of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, Temple University Hospital and the Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital.

He is also founder and former chairman and CEO of DoctorQuality, which provided patients information on healthcare safety and quality.

Shulkin, a fellow of the American College of Physicians, previously served as vice dean and chairman of medicine at Drexel University School of Medicine.

NASA looks to procure imaging and radio occultation data from commercial small satellite companies to help address the space agency’s Earth science research goals, Space News reported Wednesday.

Jeff Foust writes NASA’s budget request for fiscal year 2017 includes $30 million for satellite development and data acquisition efforts under the Small Satellite Constellations Initiative.

The report said the agency conducted a study on the feasibility of a pilot data purchase program and issued a request for information in July to assess interest from potential vendors as well as discover the types of data available in the market.

Christina Moats-Xavier, deputy program director of NASA’s Earth System Science Pathfinder program committee, said the agency found that the commercial vendor pool can offer data relevant to NASA’s Earth science research mission.

The RFI notice highlighted Global Positioning System radio occultations and medium-resolution multi-spectral images as two data classes of interest for NASA and indicated that the agency would also consider other data types, according to the report.

The Office of Personnel Management has launched a new website that offers information and tools to support talent recruitment from various sources such as federal government websites.

OPM said Tuesday CyberCareers.gov is a central element of the Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Strategy and designed to provide specific cybersecurity information and resource portals to job hunters, managers and supervisors as well as human resources personnel to aid the development of tools and guides for talent recruitment.

“The launching of the CyberCareers.gov website is an important step in advancing OPM’s mission to recruit, hire, develop, and retain the top cybersecurity talent the government needs by building the cybersecurity workforce pipeline,” said Beth Cobert, acting OPM director.

“We collaborated with agency cyber partners to create content for this website and will continue to update the site through user interactions and feedback provided from those experiences,” Cobert added.

The Federal Cybersecurity Workforce Strategy follows existing and forward-leaning policies to help agencies develop, hire, recruit and retain talent as well as build the cybersecurity workforce.