(Extended from comment.)
I think the question boils down to: do we want to answer trivial questions or not. Both direction has some dangers.
Disadvantages of making them off-topic:
- It would cause that many good-standing layman newbies would be expelled from the site.
- We will have much lower visit count.
- Furthermore, some like an "inner circle" will emerge with a - deliberate or not - goal of expelling new, productive answerers, too. Because they kill the answerable questions. I've seen many SE sites went into this direction. Yes, they have no trivial questions, but it does not mean that it would be pleasant to be there.
The advantage is that strict quality rules have an attractive power for professionals. This is a very strong argument in general. But not for us: afaik very few of us are working really on space technologies professionally. Relative often happen posts where someone identifies himself as a pro (or retired pro), like an ex-NASA engineer. These are mostly high quality answers. I don't know anybody who would be also active on the meta, or who would be interested with the site itself, too.
The site has today a main goal (to leave beta), and also in general, I believe, we need more users, more questions, more posts, more activity.
There is another argument, and this about, what is this site for. It is not only a good recreational resource, and information resource - it is a way to make the world better, by making space exploration more popular. Note, the budget of the NASA strongly depends on the interest of the people of the USA, and the future, I believe, absolutely doesn't look bright. That the NASA will be converted to a little, weather observation agency, might look a hilarious idea in our eyes, but it is a viable option for the U.S. decision makers.
Many of the answers could be easily found by checking the Wikipedia, but it does not mean that the information should not exist also here. We are not a Stack Overflow: we do not need to deal with an unbelievable continuous flood of crap content. We are small, and we have enough reviewers/curators.
The system of the Physics SE is that they have no rule for trivial questions, but they have many other rules (question has to be about mainstream physics, it can not be a low quality homework copy, and some others). But, in theory, any trivial question can be asked here. While there are regularly strong initiatives to move the balance more strongly into a professional direction, the de facto status quo is that easy questions are okay, but their quality control is stronger. I believe, some similar could work also here.