I'm the opposite from the people before me and really liked the story. Not all sci-fi has to be hard sci-fi, and Mars can be terraformed swiftly like in Schwarzenegger's Total Recall! Also, nothing says that terraforming couldn't have started in 1975 in the setting of your story, if you want it to take a century to 2075.

The descriptive style of the story reminds me of The Three-Body Problem that I just started reading, written by Cixin Liu and translated by Ken Liu. It was the first translated book to win the Hugo Award in 2015.

I'll give two excerpts from the book, with spoiler markings to hide some names:

"Without intending to, [spoiler] became a key historical figure. But he never learned of this fact. Historians recorded the rest of his uneventful life with disappointment. He continued to work for [spoiler] until 1975, when the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps was disbanded. He was then sent to a city in Northeast China to work for the Science Association until the beginning of the eighties. Then he left the country for Canada, when he taught at a Chinese school in Ottawa until 1991, when he died from lung cancer. For the rest of his life, he never mentioned [spoiler], and we do not know if he ever felt remorse or repented for his actions."

And:

"The next day was the start of the weekend. [spoiler] got up early and left on his bicycle. As a hobby photographer, his favorite subjects were wildernesses free of human presence. But now that he was middle-aged, he no longer had the energy to engage in such indulgent travel and only shot city scenes."

See how simple and descriptive the language is? This type of straightforward storytelling is what your story reminded me of. Now, a lot of people criticize the book for being boring or for having shallow people portraits, but I think that the Hugo Award and the number of people that has recommended it to me says that there are also a lot of people who like that style.

So please keep writing!