Baku, February 28 (AZERTAC). It looks like the Titanic. It is meant to feel like the Titanic. But the Australian billionaire who on Tuesday unveiled blueprints for a successor ship to the doomed ocean liner is confident his dream project will not sink like the Titanic.

At a news conference in New York, mining tycoon Clive Palmer said his ambitious plans to launch a copy of the Titanic and sail her across the Atlantic would be a tribute to those who built and backed the original.

“We will complete the journey. We will sail into New York on the ship they designed,” he said at the event being held inside the Intrepid aircraft carrier that is now a museum in the city.

But Palmer, a jovial and brash mogul who likes to style himself "professor", refused to be drawn into predicting that his new boat would be “unsinkable” - and thus avoided repeating an act of hubris that the backers of the first Titanic famously made. “Anything will sink if you put a hole in it,” Palmer admitted of Titanic II. But he joked that due to global warming the risks of travelling through the waters near the Arctic circle had lessened considerably. “There are not so many icebergs in the North Atlantic these days,” he said.

But the main designer of the new ship, Markku Kanerva, did skirt the line of giving the project a small hostage to fortune. “I can assure you, from the safety point of view, it will be absolutely the most safe cruise ship in the world when it is launched,” he said.

The outline of Titanic II is an almost exact match to the original ship, which struck an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in 1912. That means its silhouette as it travels across the waves will be virtually indistinguishable from the first ship, complete with four rear-slanted funnels.

Titanic II is set for launch in 2016 and will mostly mimic the same route from Europe to Americas. Already 40,000 applications have been submitted to be part of the maiden voyage in what is surely a triumph of hope over experience - and a sign of the clever marketing campaign that lies behind the project.

In New York a throng of journalists were treated to a video presentation of the Titanic II, set to soaring and jaunty music and animated images of guests aboard the new vessel decked out in Edwardian splendour and looking like extras from Downton Abbey, the hit TV series - which opened with news breaking of the first Titanic`s dreadful fate. Palmer said that guests aboard the new ship would have the option of wearing period costume.

Perhaps nervous about the idea of reminding people of the suffering and agony of the world`s most famous maritime disaster, Palmer was careful to bring out a descendant of a Titanic survivor to endorse the project. Helen Benziger was a granddaughter of Molly Brown, a socialite who became famous for persuading a lifeboat to turn around and search for survivors. She heartily backed the new venture. “Bringing this ship back? I don`t know the words,” she said. “It is a chance to go back in time.”