Discovery Channel Science
This article is a bit like a typical Discovery Channel science program - oversimplified, factually wrong in some respects and ultimately misleading.
"...a dormant black hole will awaken and start a feeding frenzy..."
Black Holes are neither dormant and nor can they 'awake' - this suggests a change in activity or a change of state of the BH. They are, like their name suggests, essentially a hole in space and any activity or dormancy occurs in the material around the BH, not in the BH itself.
"...if anything ventures past its event horizon..."
If anything ventures past the Event Horizon of a BH then any consequences are unobservable to us, or anyone else. Once again, the clue's in the name - events are not observable beyond the Event Horizon; we can only observe events occurring outside the EH.
Btw, the plural of 'spacecraft' is 'spacecraft'.
@AC: "Could dormant black holes be the Dark Matter we seek?"
A very small proportion could be but overall, no. BHs are formed from baryonic material and insufficient baryonic material was formed in the Big Bang to account for the total amount of Dark Matter required to explain what we observe. In addition, if all of the DM were in the form of BHs then the microlensing effects we see due to DM would have different characteristics.