Not much is known of Cooper's early life except that when he was growing up there were no baseball games played due to Food Riots among other things.

About ten years before the launch of the Endurance, Cooper worked for NASA as a test pilot. The testbed he used was a prototype Ranger, while over The Straits, a gravitational anamoly caused him to crash the spacecraft. While at NASA he met Dr. John Brand.

Cooper is roughly 35 at the time of launch of the Endurance. At first, he was dismissive about Murph's fixation on a "ghost" in her room. Eventually he was swayed by odd occurences around his household. Including a set of coordinates given to him in binary which led to the new headquarters facility for NASA.

Cooper is one of the four surviving crew members of the Endurance, along with Brand, and their robot companions TARS and CASE.