(Mentioned in the episode ' Rogue Planet'. As a youth, Archer earned the Eagle Scout Award, along with 26 Merit Badges, from the Boy Scouts of America. His dreams of exploring started as a boy. The second-season episode 'First Flight' depicted in flashback that he spent many years as a test pilot in the nascent Starfleet's NX program, based in San Francisco.

Archer, the son of famed warp engineer Henry Archer and his wife Sally, was born in 2112 on August 4 in Upstate New York, where he spent most of his formative years he later claimed to have spent the majority of his life in San Francisco.