Why doesn't NASA try to contact Cooper?

Question

Cooper and Murph find the hidden NASA headquarters via decoding patterns in the dust in their library

which turn out to be signals sent by the future Cooper via the tesseract.

Upon arriving at NASA, Brand recruits Cooper for the Endurance mission, saying he is the pilot they need, and that "this is the mission you've been trained for."

Why does it take all that coded message hoopla to get Cooper to NASA? If they know he's the perfect trained pilot, why don't they just go visit his farm and recruit him there earlier?

Answer 1

At the baseball game, Cooper mentions that when he was younger, everyone was too busy fighting over food to be playing baseball.

The implication is, society had almost totally collapsed. Things like centralized records would no longer be maintained. As zack said in comments, NASA had no idea if Cooper was still alive let alone where he was.

In addition, we don't see much evidence of computerized records or the Internet in Cooper's community. As I recall, the school office is full of paper files instead of computer terminals. Cooper is considered pretty weird and eccentric for building computer-controlled farm equipment. Whatever government still exists may be rather decentralized and keep its records on paper, so searching for any records of Cooper would be a difficult and possibly futile task.

Finally, the general public are not aware of NASA's continued existence. NASA are trying to keep a low profile, and wouldn't want to draw attention to themselves by actively searching for Cooper -- especially since their resources and personnel are very limited.

Bearing this in mind, it's a remarkable coincidence that of all the places Cooper could have gone,

he lives less than a day's drive from NASA's secret headquarters.

We can just call this dramatic licence, unless there was

additional interference from the black hole engineers

which doesn't really seem consistent with

their need to recruit Cooper to communicate with Earth in the first place.

Answer 2

When Coop talks to Brand father, he actually asks, why him, and they have no answer, they basically tell him that they didn't know about him (Coop) until he came into their door, probably they meant that they haven't heard form him in a while, so they didn't know how to contact him.

Answer 3

They weren't sure if he was alive and probably didn't even know where he lived. They were ready to go even without him but it was destiny that they found Cooper.

Answer 4

The script and novelisation would strongly suggest that NASA were simply unaware that Cooper was still alive, hence their failure to contact him.

With the collapse of the previous NASA structure and the "off the grid" nature of his farming lifestyle it seems likely that they just lost track of him and assumed he was dead.

"We need a pilot. And this is the mission you were trained for.” Cooper thought back to his training. Sure as hell no one had ever mentioned anything like this to him. He’d thought Mars, maybe, or Europa at the outside. “Without ever knowing,” he said. “An hour ago, you didn’t even know I was still alive. And you were going anyway.”