A few minutes before SpaceIL's Beresheet spacecraft was launched into space, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu congratulated SpaceIL and all those involved and said: "We are already waiting for you to start working on a mission to Mars".
That got me wondering: would it be possible (i.e. in any way reasonable) to use the same fuel-saving method (ever-increasing elliptical orbits) to go to Mars? If the distance between the Earth and Mars is 225 million km (on average), while the Earth-Moon distance is ~384,000 km, how much time would it take to reach Mars this way? This website says that the spacecraft is going to travel 6.5 million km on its way to the moon, but it's supposed to take about two Earth months to get there.
So would it be possible to go to Mars this way? Will the reduction in fuel requirement offset the longer time it would take?